Investing in Tigris

The traditional clouds (AWS, GCP, and Azure) are getting dated. They continue to be the standard for the vast majority of cloud workloads, of course, but they are built around a set of operational practices that were more relevant a decade ago. Lately, we’ve seen the rise of a number of hosting platforms that are better aligned with modern development practices. 

These include Fly.io, Railway, and even front-end platforms such as Netlify and Vercel (which sometimes are built on traditional clouds). The benefits of these new platforms can be functional — Fly.io, for example, has far simpler multi-region support than AWS — but they also get adopted because they have better native support for modern applications frameworks and practices, and a far better developer experience. 

However, storage has been a key issue for moving applications wholesale to these new clouds. Offering a robust cloud storage solution is a very complex operational and technical problem. And so, many applications adopt these new clouds for the front end, but keep the back end on a traditional cloud where there is a traditional cloud storage service like Amazon S3. 

This is why I’m so excited to announce our investment in Tigris, as well as the release of its globally available S3-compatible distributed object-storage service. Tigris is built to make the application developer’s job as simple as possible. It allows an application to write in any region, and to read in any region. Heck, you can even write confliction updates in multiple regions at the same time and Tigris will resolve the updates and give a consistent global view of the data. It truly is a global multi-master storage platform. 

This is a key service for application developers who are looking to get away from the provisioning headaches and clunky interfaces of the traditional clouds. And, as a casual dev on evenings, it’s one I’ve been hoping someone would build for years.

There are very few teams who have the background to build and run such a solution, which is why I was so excited when I ran into Ovais Tariq and the Tigris team. The Tigris co-founders ran the global storage team for Uber, and had significant experience building on FoundationDB when we first met. (FoundationDB has been used to build global object-storage systems internally at companies like Apple.) We talked at length about how now was finally the right time to build a global object-storage system given the number of new cloud platforms like Fly.io, in addition to new applications being built around Javascript frameworks on hosting platforms like Netlify and Vercel.

And so here we are, with that vision having been realized. Tigris is so simple to use, I strongly recommend you give it a try — even for your evening hacking project like I do. I’m certain you’ll not want to go back to the traditional clouds again.