Episode 67: Document Database FerretDB with Peter Farkas, Co-Founder/CEO

Intro

Mike: Hello and welcome to Open Source Underdogs. I’m your host Mike Schwartz, founder of Gluu, and this is episode 67 with Peter Farkas, Co-founder and CEO of FerretDB.

Why FerretDB and not PigeonDB? That’s a very good question. Whereas pigeons are underappreciated for their speed and resiliency, ferrets are fierce and furry and loved by everyone, except Rudy Giuliani.

Mike: A MongoDB API, with PostgreSQL storage, Ferret is a database platform that seems to have a similarly wide appeal. I guess, the 800-pound gorilla in this market is MongoDB itself, with around $35 billion in equity market cap. But in addition to MongoDB, Amazon has also implemented a Mongo conformant API that uses some kind of Amazon storage.
Is there a room in this very competitive and well-capitalized Mongo Cloud database ecosystem for a scrappy start-up with a good technical idea and a track record of reliable operation?

I recorded this episode at the State of Open Conference, or SoCon, which is the largest FOSDEM fringe event. If you can make it to SoCon, I highly recommend it. Unlike FOSDEM, it’s a more traditional event with badges and keynotes, and registration, and coffee, or tea, if you’re British, and after the chaos of FOSDEM, it’s a nice change.

So, this year, SoCon rented around five media vans specifically to record podcasts. So, thanks a lot to conference organizers, it was a pretty great idea. And there’s a picture of Peter and I, donning the Underdog’s headsets on the episode website. Well, with that unusually long intro, here’s the interview.

Origin

Mike: FerretDB was founded a little more than two years ago, you were probably thinking about it for a while before that. What was the spark that led you to actually take action and start the thing, and was the plan always to start a business around FerretDB?

Peter: MongoDB decided to leave its open-source roots around 2018, and all of the co-founders of FerretDB have open-source databases for close to a decade. Peter Zaitsev, one of our co-founders, maybe more, maybe 20 years. After MongoDB went public with SSPL and their departure from open source, we’ve been waiting for a couple of years whether there will be a fork, or if the community is going to do something about it, and nothing really happened.

There was no Fork, there was no OpenTofu reaction to MongoDB’s move. And in 2021, we’ve just decided that something needs to be done. That was the time when we started FerretDB as a side project mid-2021.

Project Launch

Mike: FerretDB has over 8K stars on GitHub, which is fantastic, that’s a lot. How did you go about promoting the project to the developer community to build that kind of support?

Peter: That was the beauty of FerretDB. When we started the project, we were not sure whether someone is going to be interested at all. Since there was no OpenTofu like reaction to MongoDB’s departure from open source, we were not sure whether the community even cares.

If you take MongoDB, there’s not a lot of community around the product itself, in a sense that most of the community consists of users rather than developers of the MongoDB codebase. So, we were unsure what will be the reception. And when we started working on FerretDB, again as a side project, we just created a tech demo, we published it on GitHub, and I think, the first 4K stars came in around two days.

So, we did not do promotion, and we did not expect this kind of outpouring interest in FerretDB. And I think part of the reason why the interest was high is because we’re building on Postgres, a