Interview with the founding team of SphereEx: Receive millions of dollars in investment, take over ShardingSphere to create a new distributed ecosystem

open source infrastructure, there are more and more types of databases and more and more scenarios, which also brings new management and use problems for users. What ShardingSphere does is to provide users with a stable and unified access layer, help users use fragmented databases in a unified way, and make use of the advantages of various databases.

SphereEx, a data frontier technology start-up company, announced that it has received a multi-million dollar angel round of funding from Sequoia China Seed Fund, Capital, 1609de0bc5f3dd.

SphereEx is a company dedicated to building a new type of distributed data infrastructure. Its core contribution is the open source distributed database middleware ecosystem ShardingSphere, which has core technology features such as "platformization, pluggability, and cloud native", and is a large-scale data application. , The ideal solution for data value-added applications.

SegmentFault reporters exclusively interviewed the founding members of SphereEx, PMC Chair of Apache ShardingSphere, SphereEx founder & CEO Zhang Liang, and ShardingSphere PMC, SphereEx co-founder Juan Pan . We talked about their views on open source, Infra, database and other industries, as well as the future development plan of SphereEx.

Open source VS business: the establishment of the company is to better build the ShardingSphere ecosystem

As Apache's top open source project, ShardingSphere has been developed for more than 5 years, and has attracted more than 13K+ stars. With nearly 200 contributors, it has become one of the most popular projects in this field, . ShardingSphere is in a leading position in terms of technological completeness, stability, and community activity. It is used in the production environment of more than 160 companies, covering the Internet, finance, O2O, logistics, cloud computing and other fields, and has won many companies Recognized by open source users.

The establishment of a commercial company this time is also to better build the ShardingSphere ecosystem and empower users. SphereEx founder & CEO Zhang Liang introduced to us- active community + commercial company support is actually an excellent open source project Double insurance , so everyone can use it with more confidence. For users with strong technical capabilities, they can independently use the open source version and build an active open source community through technical discussions in the community. For users who have complex business scenarios and want professional support, SphereEx, as the support behind ShardingSphere, can also provide users with professional solutions when needed.

Talking about the company’s future development, Zhang Liang said: ShardingSphere is the cornerstone of SphereEx. The main task at present is to set up a team to make ShardingSphere itself . As an open source project with more than 160 modules, the workload is huge. The next step It is the R&D and iteration of other products.

Speaking of open source and business, Pan Juan, the co-founder of SphereEx, added, " ShardingSphere will not slow down or stop the development of the community because of the establishment of a commercial company . It is precisely because of the capital injection that ShardingSphere can be Open source and the community do better. In the future, we also hope that through open source, we will establish a unique data use ecology so that more companies can enjoy data value-added services."

Opportunities and Challenges: The explosive growth of open source infrastructure, ShardingSphere's blue ocean exploration

As an early-stage startup company, the fierce competition in the database and other industries brought about by the explosive growth of open source infrastructure also worries us. Zhang Liang, founder and CEO of SphereEx, answered the reporter's question:

With the explosion of open source infrastructure, there are more and more types of databases and more and more scenarios, which also brings new management and use problems for users. The scale of data is huge, data scenarios are diversified, architecture layers are mixed, and technology is evolving rapidly. How to decouple the underlying data foundation platform from the upper data application has become the core pain point in the digital transformation of enterprises. The concepts of Database Plus (enhanced database capabilities) and Database Mesh (database service grid) advocated by SphereEx are aimed at providing a new way of thinking. ShardingSphere, which follows this concept, does exactly what it does to provide users with a stable and unified access layer, help users use fragmented databases in a unified way, and the strengths of various databases 1609de0bc5f53d.

Whether it is data fragmentation, encryption and decryption, or flexible migration, it is actually a vertical field. Different from the fierce competition in the database field, ShardingSphere does not currently have too many competitors. The field is a blue ocean .

Speaking of the competitive landscape, the SphereEx team is also very confident. Pan Juan, the co-founder of SphereEx, introduced to us that the core advantages of ShardingSphere are mainly reflected in three aspects-

• The distributed database field that ShardingSphere works in is used by all walks of life, so has a solid position at the infrastructure level, ;
• ShardingSphere has its own unique architectural advantages. , Database Plus (enhanced database capabilities), Database Mesh (database service grid) concepts make ShardingSphere no longer a separate distributed database solution, but has become a distributed database industry Ecology.
• ShardingSphere is an open source-oriented . Many developers will voluntarily join the ecosystem and make it the industry's standard for distributed database ecosystems.

This round of financing will be used for team building, about SphereEx's talent view

At present, the core team of SphereEx, in addition to ShardingSphere's PMC Chair and PMC Zhang Liang and Pan Juan, there is also a partner Zhang Lei with many years of sales management experience who is responsible for the company's market operations. In addition, some of the core R&D and operation colleagues also come from the previous colleagues of Zhang Liang and Pan Juan at JD Technology, and the core staff of the ShardingSphere community.

As an early start-up company that has just completed an angel round of financing, this round of financing will be mainly used for team building. Those who are interested in Infra, database, open source, governance, etc., talents in Go language, Java language, Mesh, market operation, etc. are all the objects that SphereEx is looking for.

Speaking of talent recruitment, Zhang Liang added, “We recruit excellent talents. Not only do we hope that they will help SphereEx grow, but we also hope that through several years of open source practice, help China Open Source cultivate more talents and lead more talents to join Open Source. "

Everyone is welcome to your resume at 1609de0bc5f744 [e-mail] to achieve mutual achievement with the company and realize professional ideals and personal values.

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At the end of the interview, Zhang Liang talked to us about the meaning of the company's brand name "SphereEx". Sphere means ecological, and it also comes from the name of the open source project ShardingSphere, which reflects the inheritance of commercial companies and open source projects. And Ex can be understood as Extension or Explore, which represents the company's expansion and exploration of the entire ecosystem.

We also look forward to seeing ShardingSphere gradually mature, and the young SphereEx can continue to develop, with the spirit of infinite exploration, sailing on the road of excavating the database ecology.

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