I spoke with Tom Wilkie, CTO of Grafana about what it’s like scaling open source projects while building a commercial company around them. Discussed the challenges, lessons, and what goes on behind the scenes of a tool so many of us use.

Want to be a guest on the show? I’m always looking to chat with builders, founders, and engineers working on interesting problems. Connect with me at contact@techwithkunal.com, I’d love to hear your story.

In this episode of Lessons from Production, I’m joined by Bhanu from TiDB and Nikhil from ElasticRun. We dive into what it really takes to run open source databases at scale, from architecture choices to reliability challenges, performance tuning, and real-world war stories. Whether you're managing distributed systems or just curious about how companies like ElasticRun use TiDB in production, there's a lot to learn from this one.

TiDB Cloud free trial here. Shoutout to them for sponsoring this podcast.

TiDB is an open-source, distributed SQL database built for real-time analytics on transactional data. It combines the best of both OLTP and OLAP, making it ideal for modern applications needing scale, speed, and flexibility.

Want to be a guest on the show? I’m always looking to chat with builders, founders, and engineers working on interesting problems. Connect with me at contact@techwithkunal.com, I’d love to hear your story.

Observability has been the buzzword across the stack, and businesses are toiling hard to achieve end-to-end visibility. While tech observability is fairly mature, cloud cost observability remains a missing link.

In this episode of Lessons from Production, I spoke with Ananth from Zoho (sponsoring this episode) as we dive into what cloud cost observability really means, how it's different from tech-stack observability, best practices to achieve it, and real-world case studies that show how it can drive informed business decisions.

Want to be a guest on the show? I’m always looking to chat with builders, founders, and engineers working on interesting problems. Connect with me at contact@techwithkunal.com, I’d love to hear your story.