Momento is built on Pelikan, Twitter’s open source caching framework. But choosing an engine is only part of delivering a cache; teams still need a service around it.
Momento cofounder Daniela Miao and Twitter Principal Engineer Yao Yue joined the Open Source Startup Podcast. Yao was a core part of Twitter’s Pelikan Cache team. They discuss what it was like for Momento to launch on an open source project owned by another team.
What the conversation covers
Daniela and Yao explore three parts of building an open source startup:
- the relationship between a caching engine and a managed service
- messaging and positioning for technical companies
- the importance of a vibrant developer community
Position the outcome, not the machinery
Daniela explains the first distinction with an aviation metaphor:
Memcached, KeyDB, Redis, DragonflyDB… They’re all engines. And to the end consumer who wants to get from point A to point B, just having an engine without the plane is not useful at all.
So, in order to get there, the next step of course is that you have to have an airplane that does everything else…, which in this analogy is managed caching services: Amazon ElastiCache, Google Memorystore, Redis Labs… They give you a mechanism through which you can get from point A to point B.
However, only an airplane is a lot of work: ongoing maintenance costs, upfront costs, configuration costs, etc. With Momento, we aim to provide the actual airline service—the end-to-end experience where we just focus on getting you from point A to point B in the fastest time possible without you having to worry about what kind of engine you’re using, changing the seating arrangements, etc.
—Daniela Miao
Validate the product, then build the community
Later in the episode, Daniela describes how Momento approached community building. The team first put its beta in customers’ hands so it could learn from production workloads. Once the product had been battle-tested, Momento invested more deeply in collaborating with Pelikan contributors and creating technical education around the ecosystem.
Listen to the full conversation
Listen to episode 49 of the Open Source Startup Podcast for the full conversation about Pelikan, managed caching, and building a technical community.
