Tigris Data CEO on Building Your Own Datacenters

**Ovais Tariq** (0:00)
Before Cloud, it was the same thing. You have SANS and you need to have storage administrators. Everyone needed to do capacity planning. Nowadays, just the service providers that have to do the capacity planning. Guess what's the simplest thing to do with immutable? Taking a snapshot, just like a pointer in time. So that's what we're breaking on. That's what we're using a feature that allows you to fork instantly. Even if it's a petabyte of bucket, you can instantly create a fork, zero copy fork.
The global part or the routing part, that is where distributed system knowledge is important. So for example, in our case, we are an active system. So you can write anywhere, read anywhere, multi-master writes. So that brings consistency problems. How do you deal with that? How do you provide read-after-write consistency? That's a distributed system problem. But when you think about the bytes getting stored on disk, that's where it becomes hyper-localized storage problem. But how do you make sure that the bits are always there the same way that they have always existed?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:56)
In this episode, a16z general partner, Martin Casado sits down with Ovais Tariq, co-founder and CEO of Tigris Data, to discuss what independent storage is so hard, what operating your own data centers is like, and what's in store for the future of cloud. Let's get into it.

**Martin Casado** (1:13)
Ovais, thanks very much for joining us. So for everybody listening, we're having a chat with Ovais Tariq, founder and CEO of Tigris, which is one of the few actual super core infrastructure companies right now. So I'm very excited for this. And so let me just provide a bit of background. So Tigris does storage, think of like S3. It is the leader in doing storage for AI companies, which are incredibly storage heavy, right? A lot of these gen AI companies think image and video, et cetera. And when I say infrastructure, I mean like all the way down to data centers and servers and the whole thing. So, you know, the reason I was very excited for this, there aren't a lot of companies that are, you know, like that level of ambition. You've got a huge background to do this. We're going to talk through, you know, how does AI change the needs for infrastructure? And then we're going to talk through kind of like your experiences doing this. So welcome.

**Ovais Tariq** (1:59)
Thank you so much. Great to be here.

**Martin Casado** (2:00)
So let's go ahead and start this way. So maybe, can you give a little bit of a background that kind of brought you to this case? I mean, like you, I mean, didn't you run storage for Uber?

**Ovais Tariq** (2:11)
Yes. So I founded Tigris with...

**Martin Casado** (2:14)
Is it Tigris or Tigris?

**Ovais Tariq** (2:16)
I mean, the Americanized way of saying it is Tigris, but I guess the real way is the way that you're using before. It is Tigris. But I've been used to saying Tigris, because that's what resonates more with people. So that's how I've been.

**Martin Casado** (2:28)
Went into Silicon Valley. Fair enough.

**Ovais Tariq** (2:30)
Yeah. So going back to how all of this started, how I got into this. So Tigris started about four years ago. I have two other co-founders. They worked with me at Uber.
As you mentioned, I ran storage at Uber. Uber had a global storage footprint. Uber was one of the companies that was very different from other companies at that time. Uber wasn't building on the public cloud. Uber was running its own data centers. And Uber had a global infrastructure problem. Uber has to be available in all of these cities all around the world. And uptime is really important because there are a lot of critical services that are also dependent on moving people around. So being part of that, kind of building out the storage part of the global infrastructure, having to deal with data center, even designing our own hardware and building at that scale gave me some unique insights into how a similar kind of infrastructure could be built outside. And then I started working on Tigris.

**Martin Casado** (3:24)
Awesome. I've always wondered this. You take most of the popular cloud services, say whatever, Redshift, the data warehouse, you've got an independent company. And like the one area that is taking a long time for somebody to build an independent company has just been storage. And do you have any guesses to why that is? Or do you have any theories on why that is?

**Ovais Tariq** (3:43)
You are right in terms of, if you look at other foundational services, for example, you mentioned Redshift and then Snowflake, DataBricks, right? They are much more successful as compared to what you have.