In today’s fast-paced tech environment, businesses are seeking innovative ways to streamline operations, enhance scalability, and improve overall efficiency. Bhanu Jamwal, Head of Presales and Solution Engineering, APAC at TiDB, shares his insights on how modern application development is evolving to meet these needs. In this exclusive interview with Tech Achieve Media, Jamwal highlights the top trends reshaping the industry, including serverless architectures, low-code/no-code platforms, and cloud-native applications. He also discusses TiDB’s role in driving digital transformation, India’s strategic importance in their expansion plans, and how distributed SQL systems are addressing scalability and reliability challenges in real-world applications.
TAM: Can you share your insights on the latest trends in modern application development and how they are transforming business operations?
Bhanu Jamwal: Today’s rapid pace of advancement in technology is forging new paths in the modern application development landscape. Businesses are constantly innovating and finding new ways to solve their business challenges leveraging the power of technology. Every year, new trends emerge and reshape the way applications are developed.
Here are the top three trends that I see will drive the modern application development in 2024:
Serverless architectures, such as AWS Lambda and Azure Functions, enable businesses to build and operate applications without the need to manage infrastructure. With serverless, developers can focus exclusively on writing code while the cloud provider takes care of provisioning, scaling, and server management. As applications move to the cloud, serverless databases like Amazon Aurora Serverless, TiDB serverless provide scalable, fully managed solutions that automatically adjust to workload demands. This allows developers to focus on building applications without managing database infrastructure.
Low-code and no-code development platforms are SaaS solutions that empower business users, or developers, to build applications with little to no coding knowledge using visual interfaces and pre-built components. These platforms enable faster application development and deployment, reducing dependence on specialized developers and IT resources. As SaaS offerings, they further simplify access and scalability, allowing non-technical teams to create essential business tools, which boosts agility and responsiveness to market changes.
Cloud-native applications, built specifically for cloud environments, leverage the cloud’s elasticity, scalability, and resilience. Using microservices, containers (such as Docker), and orchestration tools (like Kubernetes), businesses can scale operations effortlessly and deploy updates rapidly without service disruptions. This flexibility is essential for industries with variable demand, like e-commerce, streaming, and digital payments. Cloud-native architectures also streamline infrastructure management and help reduce operational costs.
TAM: How do you see India as an integral part of your future plans?
Bhanu Jamwal: India is one of the fastest growing economies in the world and it aims to reach milestone of $1 trillion-dollar digital economy by 2030. It is leading the charge in digital infrastructure and innovation outpacing many developed economies in the world. India is a promising market for TiDB. With availability of highly skilled talent pool and rapid digitization and adoption of emerging technology among Indian enterprises, we are looking at five-fold growth within next three years. We are also expanding our team in India. We also continue to support developer community in India through our initiatives and programs.
TAM: Could you elaborate on TiDB’s mission and vision for empowering developers and businesses with scalable and reliable database solutions?
Bhanu Jamwal: We are actively involved in supporting the developer community in India to address traditional database challenges and promote the adoption of distributed SQL systems like TiDB. Through our novel initiative called PingCAP University, we offer courses and certifications to enhance skills in managing distributed SQL databases, helping developers and IT professionals understand TiDB’s capabilities in large-scale data scenarios. We also engage with the local IT community through workshops, training sessions, and hackathons, contributing to local talent development and innovation.
To empower developers transitioning to modern distributed systems, TiDB offers comprehensive resources including extensive documentation, developer guides, and a dedicated community forum. As an open-source project, TiDB encourages contributions from Indian developers, allowing them to influence the technology, gain recognition, and improve the software.
TAM: How do distributed systems play a crucial role in addressing the scalability and reliability challenges faced by modern applications?
Bhanu Jamwal: Modern application developers are pivoting towards distributed SQL databases like TiDB as it is equipped to address scalability and reliability challenges of traditional databases. TiDB’s distributed architecture allows businesses to scale horizontally, overcoming single-machine limitations. With automatic sharding and separation of storage and computing, enterprises can seamlessly manage and expand their data infrastructure in the cloud, fostering innovation and growth.
Distributed SQL database solves challenges faced by modern applications by offering several key benefits below:
Horizontal scalability: It can scale horizontally by adding more nodes, and handling increased loads without performance degradation, unlike traditional vertical scaling.
Automatic sharding: Advanced distributed SQL database automates sharding, distributing data across nodes to balance loads and prevent bottlenecks, unlike the manual, error-prone sharding in traditional databases.
Separation of storage and compute: They separate storage and compute, allowing independent scaling of resources, which is ideal for dynamic cloud environments.
High availability and strong consistency: They ensure high availability and strong consistency, maintaining functionality even during node failures.
Real-time HTAP: Advanced distributed SQL database supports both transactional and analytical workloads, simplifying architecture by eliminating the need for separate OLTP and OLAP systems.
Cloud-native design: It supports elastic scaling and deployment in various cloud environments.
MySQL Compatibility: TiDB’s compatibility with MySQL allows users to migrate applications from MySQL to TiDB with minimal changes in most cases.
TAM: Can you provide some specific examples of how TiDB has been utilized in real-world scenarios and the business outcomes it has driven?
Bhanu Jamwal: Businesses ranging from small startups to big enterprises have achieved wide range of use cases after adopting TiDB. Some of the world’s largest companies across sectors like e-commerce, retail, financial services, SaaS, and gaming trust TiDB to handle their business-critical workloads.One of India’s largest e-commerce companies and a leading logistic player are leveraging TiDB to address their business challenges. For this e-commerce company, TiDB’s horizontal scalability and distributed architecture ensured system reliability during high-traffic events, simplified database management, and enhanced real-time data processing. These improvements significantly optimized the company’s operations, particularly during major sales events, enhancing overall customer experience.
The logistics company was struggling to provide a real-time view of daily operations for effective decision-making by ground staff. After adopting TiDB, they now perform real-time analytics and gain timely parcel tracking insights, leading to more effective parcel management.
Globally, Pinterest, after implementing TiDB, achieved 80% cost reduction, strong consistency, and better latency compared to their previous system; they were able to reduce their system from six components to only one, significantly reducing the maintenance burden. In Japan, a leading payment provider achieved 10x higher throughput and 30% lower latency, enhancing mobile payment services for 45 million users.
