Cockroach Labs CTO: Google became too comfortable, I wasn't being challenged
Interview Cockroach Labs released the serverless version of its eponymous database for general availability last week. The Register took the opportunity to catch up with CTO Peter Mattis – a Google veteran who is also behind open source image editing software GIMP.
Mattis started the Cockroach project with former UC Berkeley roommate Spencer Kimball around eight years ago. They also worked together at photo-sharing startup Viewfinder. With Cockroach they were trying to get the kind of horizontal scalability from a distributed relational database they had seen at Google, where Mattis had worked for nine and a half years. He'd worked on projects including the original indexing and storage system for Gmail, and the distributed file system Colossus.
"Eventually, Google became too comfortable. They just have too much money flowing around their system. I didn't feel like I was being challenged and it felt like I was stagnating," he says.
