A Lesson in Scaling: How Kami handled 25x growth with CTO and Co-Founder Jordan Thoms

Description

When applications built on Postgres see tremendous growth, they can start to hit limitations when it comes to scale. This was true for Kami, the world’s #1 digital classroom application, which saw tremendous growth as classrooms adapted to virtual learning during the pandemic. In this episode, we hear about the transformative journey of Kami from Co-Founder and CTO Jordan Thoms. We’ll cover everything from the company’s roots in New Zealand, its early focus on teacher empowerment, and the pivotal moments in adapting its product direction based on the needs of the global education community. Join us as we discuss: ✔️ Challenges Kami faced in scaling to meet demands of 25x usage in a 6 month period — including how they solved for this by migrating from Postgres to CockroachDB. ✔️ How businesses can make the right architectural choices early on to accommodate for massive growth. ✔️ Discussing the value of AI in education A Lesson in Scaling: How Kami handled 25x growth with CTO and Co-Founder Jordan Thoms 00:00 Welcome/Introduction 00:42 What does Kami do and what inspired Jordan to build it? 08:59 What startups inspired Jordan? 12:47 What made Jordan choose a career in engineering? 16:25 The early tech stack at Kami and why they migrated from Postgres to CockroachDB 20:57 Dealing with a massive demand for virtual learning 25:38 Building for scale and other architectural decisions 29:58 Behind Kami's global team 35:12 A look at Kami's cloud-first SaaS architecture 36:54 A multi-tenant deployment 39:34 Building a SaaS product for education and integrating the state-of-the-art technologies Big Ideas In App Architecture is a podcast for architects and engineers who are building modern, data-intensive applications and systems. In each weekly episode, an innovator joins host David Joy to share useful insights from their experiences building reliable, scalable, maintainable systems. #cockroachdb #postgres #distributedSQL #AI