SF Scala: Grant Gavares Interview

SF Scala: Grant Gavares Interview

Recording: SF Scala: Grant Gavares Interview

Hello everybody, I'm Alexey Krabrov, the organizer of SF Scala and here we are in Auckland in the offices of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure team who invited us for the first time here and we're super happy to find our new neighbors and friends and here with us we have Grant Gavaris who is the architect in the cloud team and so he will tell us today in the technical talk more about how they use Scala and AAC of cloud services but I just wanted to thank Grant for having us and ask you know tell us a little bit about your career you know how did you end up architecting the cloud services for for Oracle Cloud yeah so I actually got pretty lucky early on in my career I I joined a company called Amazon and they just started a new group called AWS and I was probably around the first they'd say 20-25 people in AWS and so I was really fortunate to be part of that group learned from some really smart people and you know build one of the really early versions of a successful cloud sort of migrated around doing startups in Seattle ended up in the Bay Area and a lot of the people I worked with back in the very early 2000s at AWS had all come over to Oracle to come build a cloud at Oracle and so here we all are and it sort of feels like a great big reunion from the early days at Amazon interesting yeah I incidentally worked for Amazon okay around 2005 and seven so I was in back met oh and I was in back met around the time so I haven't worked with AWS I wasn't personalization okay so but I remember people talking about it yeah and you know when I moved to the Bay Area in 2011-12 I was one of the early users of AWS in the startups now obviously everybody uses it I went to the first area event so so this is interesting right so obviously like Amazon is the leader and we have Asia so but Oracle is you know very entrenched in in kind of backbone of many companies so it's like what's kind of you guys are building Oracle cloud what's your take on the cloud like yeah I think there's actually a pretty big shift a mental shift that a lot of us had to make when we came over here you know if you look at the type of customer that Amazon has had success with in AWS there's a lot of a pretty broad swath of the the the ecosystem out there is attracted to AWS we actually find we have a lot more success with a very different part of the market and that is the traditional Oracle customer it's the fortune 100 it's companies that have very large IT investments and they're looking to figure out how it is that they go and lift and shift move into the cloud modernize their workloads get off of legacy stuff like J2EE and maybe even web logic in a lot of cases they're looking for an opportunity for what does it mean to come and run our workloads in the cloud using modern technologies and that's one of the things my group focuses on is the container native group is really helping enable these these these companies to come and use things like Kubernetes and and other more modern frameworks and languages so it's been a big learning experience but it's really exciting working these customers because they come with real workloads they come with you know big budgets and so it gives us the opportunity to really go push the envelope a lot mm-hmm so I remember I worked downtown San Francisco and I think I was there around one of the Oracle conferences when Larellis and announced Oracle cloud and so I was passing by and it was really interesting because he was kind of pitching the advantages and one of the things he mentioned was that it's built from the ground up and by virtue of being built recently it is more suitable for instance for fast databases because it has fiber optical cables connecting them and so so basically what you take on this so does Oracle can fit the rate on AWS by being new here and has advantages because it's a new cloud yeah you know having having 14 years of hindsight is a really powerful powerful thing for us you know when we started in AWS at Amazon we were moving into data centers that were built to sell books right and we learned a lot over time and we open new data centers we sort of re-architected them but here at Oracle we took all the knowledge and learnings that we'd had for the past 14 years you know poured new concrete into new data centers and really went and built absolutely state-of-the-art data centers and we did a lot of interesting things with the way we think about the relationship between network and compute you know initially when we launched it was a bare metal cloud and there's a lot of really interesting things you can do when you have true bare metal including showing up with your own hypervisors but one of the other things that means is that you know the customers in our data centers you asked about the network you know they get line rate as advertised there's no over subscription to the network like there are a lot of other cloud providers and so when people come to our cloud they're used to saying oh I've got a one gig Nick but I might get you know a tenth of that out of there you know in our cloud you actually get line rate across these NICs and between all the different hosts in our data center which are fully connected in a very advanced network topology and so database workloads are incredibly fast and a lot of the other sort of latency sensitive workloads that people run and other cloud providers they see pretty big speed up when they come to our cloud you know I'm I'm really proud of the technology we have and you know I'm a user of the cloud that we've built here and you know I'm very very proud of what we've done cool cool so and obviously you guys are using Scala which is you know great news for me because for years I tried to find folks at Oracle doing Scala and I couldn't find any yeah right and so people would come to the meetups and the conferences and kind of they play with Scala but you know Oracle as an organization did not do that and so I think they acquired a company in Montana and I think I've seen you know we had this folks but you know they did not interact with the headquarters much so I think this is really great to see you guys here can you talk a little bit about how you know you you kind of managed to do Scala and how does it work in like in traditional Java company yeah so I'm sure there were people somewhere doing Scala and Oracle when I got here but I certainly evangelized it within our group I started a team and Scala was the language that I picked that we were going to use I'd had plenty of experience with it prior to coming to Oracle and I I really liked the language it actually was a fairly easy sell most of the Oracle cloud is actually a Java based shop and so a lot of our SDKs our libraries a lot of the work we do is very shareable of course between the two languages so we fit well with everybody else and what I've seen is the Scala footprint has been steadily expanding in the three years that I've been here we now have teams and multiple offices that are in you know from our headquarters in Seattle down in LA there's teams using it we have teams here and we're starting to form a nice Scala community even within our within our cloud group as people are getting more and more enthusiastic about the ability to come and leverage tools like Akka and Scala to solve our big cloud scaling problems it was a it was a bit of a shift for some of the older for some of the the people that have been Oracle a little bit longer but I think the real value one of the one of the one of the bigger assets that Oracle actually has is the JVM itself the Java language is a fine language but the JVM is an amazing piece of software and being able to leverage everything it brings to the table across multiple languages is a big opportunity for us so I'm really excited about the work that's being done there I think Java 12 looks fantastic I'm also excited about the growl VM and truffle work that's being done I think there's a lot of opportunity to get a lot more mileage out of the JVM and Scala is the language that I like to write and on top of the JVM how did you come to Scala yourself what's just called your name yeah I had been writing mostly Java AWS was mostly in Java at the time and I went to another company after that which was all Java I was I'd done a lot of my university was in a lot of Haskell and a lot of scheme and I was looking to get back to a language that had higher level constructs and had a little bit more power to it than Java and I spent a lot of time studying Clojure Java a little bit of Scotland sorry Kotlin and some of the other languages that were coming out of time Ceylon Groovy stuff like that and Scala is the one that I decided I was gonna go bet on so I went and spent about two years at various startups writing only Scala and haven't really looked back cool this is no this is this is great and I think this is you know also great you know for the Scala users because you know having Scala people in Oracle which is the JVM mothership I think I was actually looking at this connection and you know we actually have several talks on ground VM at the scale by the bay conference okay and one from Twitter because Twitter needs more efficient JVM right because they need to like start up time and everything else yep so and but we also see other people talking about growl VM like consultants and Disney for instance so this is very interesting so that's that's that's good news cool in one question I had is about open source so I found that like you know I was at Amazon so Amazon is very good at taking open source it's not very good at putting it back right and so actually I found some people complain about that some people actually went on principle they say like we're not going to work for Amazon until it changes this way so right because it's consumes a lot of open source I think it's actually kind of a new thing in the cloud because clouds around on a bunch of open source and the question is how do you reward people who write it how do you contribute back right yeah so what's Oracle story there like how do you guys plan to to work with Scala gonna produce some open source you're gonna share back what's the philosophy if you can talk about that yeah so I think there's a couple different a couple different things that are happening specifically within our org here we've contributed a lot of a lot of code back into the open source community since I've been here specifically within my group and a lot of that has to do with the contribution we made to things like Kubernetes and the container ecosystem there's some really interesting stuff out there if you go look under Oracle's GitHub there's a lot of stuff there but there's some very specific stuff that's come out of our group that's really really compelling if you're in the container space I think that's the number one area where we're making contributions right now on the Scala front most of our contributions have been in the form of us filing tickets and then issuing pull requests to improve libraries that are out there working with the people that own some of the big libraries like Scala PB or other sort of code generation libraries and and even in a lot of cases talking with those people and figuring out how we can contract them to you know well help them continue their work and also get the features that we want out of it so we do have aspirations to open source a few of our internal Scala projects we haven't succeeded in doing that just yet here at Oracle there's there's a there's a lot of policy to go through and we're working through that now but I I wish I could point to something more concrete in the Scala space that we had we'd contributed to but I can't yet cool well I mean you know the committee is very happy to help right like the months you know once you know stuff is open source I find that a lot of people here really you know jumbled it right so for instance you know with Scala PB I was at Nitro and we wanted to use Everest and of Scala PB so we actually took that and and they wrote it as you know as ever a library and like obviously it was an open source all right so it's kind of and then suddenly you know we found like a bunch of people started using it it's amazing right and so so that's and then they started doing your work for you yeah which is really really cool yep so cool so what is like the most interesting challenge you see for for your group in the next year what are you like what keeps you up at night that's a really good question I think we have a pretty aggressive vision and roadmap for the next two and a half years that we are really starting to get a lot of traction on we're attracting a lot of attention within the company we see a lot of people flocking to our group they want to take part and build this vision I think I think our I think the biggest challenge we have is making sure that we can continue that vision and execute over the next two years and really build a really amazing set of features that we're going to be putting together and delivering to the to our to our cloud we've got a lot of people to pull in and we've got a lot to teach them about how to build cloud scale services it's it's a hard thing to do it's a hard thing to get right and teach them not just how to do it but how we do it specifically and you know and I'm hoping to to leverage Scala and the ecosystem around as much as possible to do that cool this is exciting and we're looking forward to your talk and definitely know you guys are neighbors we know would like to check in from time to time and see how you guys are doing absolutely thank you Grant thank you all right you