From Startup to International Business: The Story of VictoriaMetrics and Its Lessons (Category Engineering)

Recently, podcast Kirill Mokevnin spoke with Alexander Valalkin, co-founder and core developer of VictoriaMetrics, one of the most popular monitoring tools that successfully competes with Prometheus. I watched this interview with great interest, and I loved how Alexander talked about his journey from a cool engineer to the founder of his business. Here are the main ideas of this interview

1. The path from developer to entrepreneur. Alexander shared his experience of transformation from programmer to founder of successful IT business, spoke about the first mistakes and lessons learned 2. Prometheus problems and the birth of VictoriaMetrics. In 2016-2017 Over the years, Alexander’s team faced the limitations of Prometheus in scaling, which eventually led to the idea of creating its own solution. 3. Technical advantages of Go for databases. Go makes it easier to write and optimize databases, lowering the entry threshold and simplifying work. Profilers in Go help point optimize only the necessary 2percent 4. Engineering Thinking vs Business Approach. Engineering thinking is often naive, but it is the engine of business. The author explained why it is important for a technical specialist to develop business thinking 5. Technical product marketing. Long-term interaction with users requires not only marketing, but also a quality product. Alexander told how their content marketing on Medium and Hacker News was more effective than paid advertising 6. Open Source as a Development Strategy. After moving VictoriaMetrics to Open Source, the project began to develop actively, attracting new users and improving the product thanks to the community. 7. Enterprise contracts vs SaaS. Despite the popularity of the SaaS model among investors, Enterprise contracts were more profitable for the business of VictoriaMetrics. 8. Simplifying complex technologies. The importance of creating easy-to-use products that “just work” out of the box. Victoria Metrics automatically scales to available resources without complex setup 9. Development and expansion of the product line. The history of the creation of Victoria Logs - an additional product for processing logs, which arose based on user requests and showed the best results in benchmarks 10. Organic growth and team. The company grew to 40 Employees without external investment by hiring engineers who already have experience with their product, avoiding complex hiring processes

Interviews can be interesting for those interested in monitoring technologies, open source business or creating their own technology product.

P.S. By the way, I've been before. told It's about a documentary about Prometheus, which is referred to here as a product that people migrate from. VictoriaMetrics

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