March 27, 2023

Scale-Complexity Dilemma 

Modern applications need to do a lot of things (more features!) and they need to do them quickly for a lot of users (more scale!). Engineering teams, however, face an unfavorable tradeoff between keeping data workloads small or spending time to manage complex infrastructure. Both options negatively affect the user experience: small workloads limit the features available to the customer, while time spent fiddling with infrastructure is time not spent building better features for those customers.

Fixing scaling issues without managing complexity, or vice versa, is often a zero-sum game for engineering teams. It fails to improve the underlying relationship between scale and complexity, instead tipping the balance one way or the other while the overall user experience remains unchanged.

Scaling a software architecture to meet the demands of a growing business is one of the biggest challenges we have in the software industry and involves a constant battle of trade offs. It is particularly challenging in regards to in-memory workloads due to the inability to decouple compute and storage as with stateless systems.

A common tradeoff we see in architectures utilizing Redis is the tradeoff between scale (memory) and complexity; keep the architecture simple and limit scale, or adopt a more complicated cluster architecture in order to scale your data. However, with modern hardware there is no reason to scale out for workloads with dozens of gigabytes of memory or 100,000 queries per second.

Dragonfly Is Production-Ready, Dragonfly

Funding

Aspecta, an AI-powered profile builder for developers, raised $3.5m in Seed funding.

Emma, a no-code platform for deploying and managing cloud workflows, raised $6m in Seed funding.

Dylibso, a suite of tools to help development teams make WebAssembly projects production-ready, raised $6.6m in Seed funding.

Turnkey, a company building simple APIs to securely manage private keys across blockchains, raised $7.5m in Seed funding.

Backslash, a security platform for cloud-native applications, raised $8m in funding.

Monite, a platform for embedding multiple finance automation features into apps with a single API, raised €10m in funding.

CodiumAI, an AI-powered tool for writing tests, raised $11m in Seed funding.

Sifflet, a data stack observability tool for data engineers, raised $12.8m in Series A funding.

Coactive, a platform for querying and analyzing unstructured data in visual assets, raised $14m in funding.

Clerk, an authentication user management service with UIs and APIs, raised $15m in Series A funding.

Aembit, an identity management platform for DevOps and security engineers, raised $16.6m in Seed funding.

Numbers Station, an AI-based data transformation tool, raised $17.5m in Series A funding.

Vue Storefront, an open-source frontend-as-a-service for ecommerce companies, raised $20m in funding.

Dragonfly, modern in-memory datastore fully compatible with Redis and Memcached APIs, raised $21m in funding.

Hex, a data collaboration tool, raised $28m in funding.