Welcome to Developer Week Day 1

Hi and welcome to Macrometa’s inaugural Developer Week. I’m Chetan, Macrometa co-founder, and CEO. This week is the beginning of something very special and something a long time in the making and that is the reason that I and my 100 plus colleagues in 14 countries are incredibly excited to share Macrometa with you.

Macrometa is a new kind of platform for developers for building an entirely new generation of advanced distributed microservices using our Global Data Network (or GDN) - a hyper distributed edge cloud available across 175 edge locations around the world. The GDN lets developers like you create real time data powered services that run closer to their users and their devices in edge locations (or PoPs - short for point of presence) around the world, within 50 milliseconds of access to more than 90% of internet connected humans and their devices. 

As a developer platform, it’s important for us to build and create out in the open. Our company is built on the values of Honesty, Humility and Heartfulness. And our mission is to make every developer a superhero. We want to share knowledge, share ideas, but most importantly, we want to be available, transparent and open to the developers that use Macrometa today - and those that may in the future. Having a community and being heard are deeply important and fundamental to our mission, and we’re pursuing both this week with sincerity and honesty.

There are a lot of things to be excited about here at Macrometa, and we want to share all of those things with you. So whether you’re a curious observer, a power user, or just looking to learn, we’re happy you’re here and look forward to seeing and hearing more of you in the future.

Watch the announcement video below or keep scrolling.

Our Origin Story

My cofounder Durga and I started Macrometa in Nov, 2017 with a handful of talented and wide eyed technical dreamers to realize an idea that we both had quite accidentally been pursuing for the past 20 years - an idea of building a distributed architecture to efficiently solve the challenge of keeping data in lots of places in synch with each other. We both had worked on consistent replication and synchronization techniques for all kinds of interesting problems. And invented lots of unusual ways to solve this problem across the data stack - (I have 19 patents in data related inventions alone and Durga has invented way more than I have – but he brings the humble to our values and doesn't talk about them much).

Our young and small team envisioned a world where developers could build distributed cloud apps that were free from geographical constraints and free to run concurrently in lots of places in parallel - the challenge being keeping data (or stateful data) in synch between all these locations so that compute logic would always see consistent state. This problem has vexed computer scientists for decades who have largely accepted that the C-A-P theorem forces a tradeoff between having good consistency and sacrificing throughput (and performance) due to coordination protocols needed to guarantee consistency, or no consistency (LOL eventual consistency) and simplistic conflict resolution like last writer wins to achieve a level of throughput and practical performance required to run modern apps.

To cut a long story short - Durga and the team invented a new coordination free protocol that uses Conflict Free Replicated Data Type (CRDT) we call Coordination Free Merge Data Transforms as its underlying substrate (read more about it on our white paper). The next set of challenges we faced were in making this radical new protocol and architecture work at Edge Scale.

Where a typical cloud is really a handful of data centers - maybe 15 -20 regions in total and a customer using maybe a couple of regions (mostly for backup or high availability) - the edge is defined by extreme scales of needing apps and data to be available, replicated and synchronized and served from potentially 100s of regions for most use cases and even thousands of regions for some use cases. To do this, the team designed and built a global network (with a Content Delivery Network aka CDN like topology). We called it the Global Data Network or GDN, with a Global Data Mesh to connect, ingest, store, serve, and process data. With this architecture, developers can turn data into APIs, Edge Computing functions and Containers to perform stateful computing at hyper proximity to data producers and consumers. We also set out to solve emerging challenges with data regulation and legal frameworks for data sovereignty with our built-in, in-region Data Protection. The end result: a developer platform that is uniquely built to solve the problems of real-time data and operational analytics in a way that the cloud just can't.

And in reading all of this I hope it's obvious that our team is deeply passionate about developers, and have a clear vision for where technology is headed, and how the edge in particular can become a place as important as the cloud for where you build and run applications.

Developer Week

Our theme for developer week is, “The future is edge native: Building on the cutting edge with Macrometa and friends.” So what do we mean by that? And why should you care? Allow me to show you.

The edge has been for the past few years - the shiny new thing, where it’s only been possible to build and run what we like to call “toy and trinket” apps leaving developers frustrated because it lacks the sophistication of the cloud primarily because the ability to store and manipulate stateful data at the edge has been missing. Most edge platforms in the market have hacks for stateful data - providing multi-region reads but single-region writes, or poor consistency protocols that make them impractical for real world use (such as not being able to update or modify a key-value pair more than once in 2 seconds).

We’re not interested in building toys here at Macrometa. We’re not a Fisher-Price platform for kids. Neither is this a Barbie dream house or a Castle Greyskull to idle away an afternoon or weekend building a toy or trinket app on. We’re giving developers the seriously powerful, enterprise grade, mission critical platforms and developer tools needed to build real world apps and APIs that developers can rely on to work well and work at scale. All with extreme levels of performance.

We’re teaming up with a few incredible partners such as Akamai and DISH Wireless, as well as amazing customers such as DevCycle, Resulticks, AppSecEngineer and Arrive.gg this week (that’s the “and friends” part) and will tell their stories about why and what they have built on the edge with Macrometa, and what you can do with it, and what’s in the future. We have demos, thought pieces, videos, giveaways, and other exciting things planned all week long and we hope that you will come and join our celebration of learning, growing, ideating, and building impossible apps on the edge with Macrometa and Friends.

Happy Birthday Macrometa

I know I already said we’re not for kids, but we’re also celebrating Macrometa’s 5th birthday this week 🎉

Macrometa has grown into more than a hundred people around the world in 14 countries since those early days of November 2017. And on behalf of all of them, and my amazing co-founder and CTO Durga Gokina, I want to welcome you again to Developer Week 2022. Thank you for your time and support - see you on the edge.