🧵Here are some quick observations on what I’m seeing within distributed systems in 2022 -- largely focused on edge computing, Rust/Wasm, and databases
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Renee Shah
@reneeshah123
Partner focused on infra & dev tools | I tweet on distributed systems stuff at the seed-stage I Blog: reneeshah.medium.com 
Renee Shah’s Tweets
I've been thinking about tools re-written in Rust (partially) for better performance. This seems to be a trend. What are other examples?
1. Electron --> Tauri
2. Pandas --> Polars
3. NodeJS --> Deno
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What's different today? on ecosystems around feels "much more collaborative" than the past orchestration wars....
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On Monday, I’ll be speaking on a panel at Wasm Day at KubeCon. It's my first time speaking at a conference. Wasm will improve several categories -- which are you most excited to hear about?
- Browser databases21.5%
- Serverless edge compute52.5%
- CI/CD and build tools14.3%
- OLTP dbs & streaming11.7%
223 votesFinal results
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The future is "distributed systems primitives" as APIs (pub/sub, actors, state mgmt), and is the best OSS project for this. I’m happy to share our $4.2M seed round from Jan 2022 in , followed by a $20M Series A from Norwest in Sept 2022!
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The most exciting use of server-side WebAssembly today is as an extension language. Other applications will mature over time, but this one is needed today. 🔥
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We launched Suborbital Extension Engine (SE2), our new OSS plugin server (E2 Core), and our new website today. Here's some technical details that get me really excited:
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Heroku didn't fail. And PaaS companies aren't dead. This is a must-read analysis of the PaaS market in the last 10 years by 👇
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"PaaS is Not Dead"
Some time ago, @reneeshah123 suggested I put my thoughts on #PaaS down in writing. It took me a few months (with lots of input from @mistermac2008). But here it is: twitter.com/fermyontech/st…
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The three most valuable assets for any startup founder (in no particular order): Perseverance, and .
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2022 infrastructure trending words (and this is a positive thing): Nix, Datalog, and Neon. I’m excited about all 3. 🙂
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PaaS companies haven’t always been great businesses, but this is changing. New PaaS companies have learned from the past, and they're creating different “layers of abstraction” for developers & enterprises. I’d also argue that Netlify/Vercel are PaaS cos that are successful.
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Technology that is easy to set up – but then difficult to debug – is still a problem and is blocking adoption. Streaming systems are hard to debug (and hard to set up), Wasm modules are hard to debug, and FaaS is still hard to debug.
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Infrastructure companies are betting more heavily in security, where there are huge budgets. Datadog & Elastic have moved into the SIEM space. Edge providers (Cloudflare / Fastly) have always had strong security benefits.
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Containers are here to stay, but alternatives are also becoming more mainstream. MicroVMs and Wasm sandboxes are two examples. I’m curious if orchestration systems (e.g. k8s/Nomad) will start to think beyond containers as the main deployment unit.
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DevEx seems more defensible than ever, especially given that companies are expanding the meaning of DevEx. This is most obvious in the newer database companies (e.g. & ). DevEx now includes docs, easy set up, debugging, access controls, analytics, etc.
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I’m convinced that the next frontier for WebAssembly will be within the database. I’ve seen demos of Postgres and SQLite compiling to Wasm in the browser. Wasm will also bring compute closer to the data, and I’ve seen Wasm modules running literally inside database tables.
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Rust is here to stay for distributed systems, but the communities around and (recently) are impressive. Rather than competing with Rust, both show that Rust got a lot of things right. Carbon also just makes sense for orgs with lots of legacy C++ codebases.
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I’m seeing more companies build their applications on Cloudflare (and other edge providers), and this is the new application paradigm I’m most excited about. Global state management for the edge is still the biggest problem, especially local-first and multi-writer systems.
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The Rust community is following the Jamstack pattern within the JS community. There are so many new frontend frameworks written in Rust that resemble React. There are many more JS developers vs. Rust developers, but Rust seems to be gaining in a small way on the frontend.
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SQLite is having a renaissance in 2022 driven by its use in the browser and on the edge. I’m excited about new solutions that provide a persistent backend for SQLite on the web and that provide global replication on the edge for SQLite.
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Announcing fRPC: A Faster, More Flexible RPC Framework
Today we're launching frpc-go, an RPC framework that's designed from the ground up to be lightweight, extensible, and extremely performant.
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The frontend has always been important for application development, and its importance is also increasing rapidly. Gone are the days of the "thin client." This is another great example of better tooling for frontend developers. Excited for !
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Containers didn’t replace VMs. VM consumption went up alongside containers. Server-side WebAssembly will be no different. But first, developers need the ability to build Wasm apps in seconds. We’re so excited to announce our $6M seed round in ! amplifypartners.com/firm-news/ferm
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Loved this convo w/ about and the potential of WebAssembly 💪
&& I especially loved the s/o to the brilliant 🥰
Check out & I’s chat 👇
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New Open Source Startup Podcast Episode
Ft. @technosophos co-founder & CEO of @fermyontech
Great convo about WebAssembly & the next gen of cloud computing 
anchor.fm/ossstartuppodcShow this thread
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The best security products nail workflow for the developer, but it's hard to get this workflow just right. A policy engine for supply chain security is novel, and the easy build system integrations make it even better. Thanks & !
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Chainguard Enforce: Software Supply Chain Security for K8s ift.tt/ZGumaje
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For any emerging technology, the early battle is figuring out how and why to use it. I sought to answer how and why people are using WebAssembly, and I got 18 great answers. See my post where 18 startup leaders discuss why they chose to build with Wasm!
reneeshah.medium.com/how-webassembl
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Thank you to these 18 people for sharing their Wasm stories:
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For any emerging technology, the early battle is figuring out how and why to use it. I sought to answer how and why people are using WebAssembly, and I got 18 great answers. See my post where 18 startup leaders discuss why they chose to build with Wasm!
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Had a nice convo with , she took time to explain how stuff really works from VC point of view, angel investors and other great knowledge, previously dropped great knowledge at one of my Twitter spaces, looks like have awesome people!
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Discord seems to be chipping away at Slack to own developer communities. I’ve seen a few OSS companies migrate their communities from Slack to Discord, which is a heavy lift. I’ve heard it’s a combo of lower price & ability to customize in .
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Github stars are far from a perfect metric. That said, all of these projects are core pieces of server-side Wasm infrastructure. All of these projects landed on Github in 2019. All are “up and to the right” in the last 2-3 years.
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📢 I'm thrilled to announce my new company, Diagrid () together with co-founder . Read our full announcement here: diagrid.io/aboutus. 🎇
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Open-source business models require patience. It takes (at least) 18-24 months to build a community. And even then, you try to keep the lines clean between the OSS & commercial product. Most content has a lag, so your content doesn't reap benefits for months. Ty ! 🙂
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NEWPOST: There is such a thing as an open source business model.
@reneeshah123 helps me breakdown the new open source business model and why it's a game-changer.
tracymiranda.com/2022/01/18/the
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. is hands down the smartest investor I've ever worked with (sorry ), so excited to see this!!
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Sat down with @AmplifyPartners, and we decided it was time to DTR. 
Very excited to double down and continue to focus on distributed systems, developer tools, and security!
amplifypartners.com/firm-news/ampl
Very excited to double down and continue to focus on distributed systems, developer tools, and security!
amplifypartners.com/firm-news/ampl2
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Best news I've heard all week, Renee ROCKS!
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Sat down with @AmplifyPartners, and we decided it was time to DTR. Very excited to double down and continue to focus on distributed systems, developer tools, and security!
amplifypartners.com/firm-news/ampl
Very excited to double down and continue to focus on distributed systems, developer tools, and security!
amplifypartners.com/firm-news/ampl1
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Sat down with , and we decided it was time to DTR. 😍 Very excited to double down and continue to focus on distributed systems, developer tools, and security!
amplifypartners.com/firm-news/ampl
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10 developer-focused companies that impressed me with their strategy in 2021 (in alphabetical order & purposely not mentioning our portfolio): , , , , , , , , ,
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The data warehouse continued to change every industry this year. It’s also commoditized storage as a business model. It’s cool to see Snowflake as a SIEM in security and as a system of record for product analytics & observability. Startups are building layers on top.
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I heard more talk about building alternatives to Splunk, Elastic, Kafka, and Auth0 in 2021 than in the past. This isn’t new, and these companies/technologies will thrive for a long time, but I sensed room for alternatives – largely based on developer experience (sometimes cost).
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For Jamstack developers, the combo of static rendering & server-side rendering was key. This allowed for faster & more dynamic apps. I was impressed with the growth of certain frameworks this year (e.g. Svelte, Next) and with strong Jamstack adoption in mainstream companies.
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