The Data Stack Show - The PRQL: From Monoliths to Microservices with Mark Fussell, Founder & CEO at Diagrid

Episode Date: April 21, 2025

The Data Stack Show is a weekly podcast powered by RudderStack, the CDP for developers. Each week we’ll talk to data engineers, analysts, and data scientists about their experience around building and maintaining data infrastructure, delivering data and data products, and driving better outcomes across their businesses with data.RudderStack helps businesses make the most out of their customer data while ensuring data privacy and security. To learn more about RudderStack visit rudderstack.com.

Here on the Data Stack Show, we have been to many of the major data conferences across the industry. But year after year, one of our favorite ones is data council, and it's because of how much value we get when we go. I think this year is going to be the best one yet. It's three days long in-person,

April 22nd to 24th in Oakland, so back in the Bay Area. The theme this year is meeting your AI and data heroes, IRL, and I am personally extremely excited to meet some people that I have admired for a long time and a bunch of people that we've had on the show. I'm really excited to learn what is happening at the cutting edge of AI and data, and also hear

from people building new tools in the standard data space. Welcome to the Data Stack Show prequel. This is a short bonus episode where we preview the upcoming show. You'll get to meet our guests and hear about the topics we're going to cover. If they're interesting to you, you can catch the full-length show when it drops on Wednesday. Mark, it has been almost three years since we've had a microservices expert on the podcast, which is way, way too long.

We're so excited to have you on the show. Thanks for joining us. It's fabulous to be here. James, be on your show. Yeah for joining us. It's fabulous to be here. And thanks for being on the show. Yeah, I've got a background about myself. I joined and worked at Microsoft for over 20 years, built many different developer technologies there, and then started some open source project there called Dapper, and then built and left Microsoft

to start Diagood as a company. And there we kind of focused on building distributed application by service architecture. So it's fantastic to be on the show. Awesome. So we were talking before the show some Mark and one of the topics I love to dig into is this microservices versus monolith discussion

which you had a great perspective on. So I'm excited to dig in on that. What are some topics you're happy to hit? Well, I think that was the evolution of architectures from the client service to the modern application development. What are the challenges that developers are struggling with today? Because you've got a lot of complexity happening out there.

And how do we simplify their world? And how do we kind of make the lives of developers so much easier rather than going through the pain and suffering that they need to? And they can focus on their business problems and not on sort of building infrastructure platforms growth. So that and of course the rise of applications with language models and how does that bring in changing developers ecosystems. So it's exciting to be here today and talk through all this with you. Well let's dig in. All right let's do it. All right that's a wrap for the prequel. The full-length episode will drop Wednesday morning. Subscribe now so you don't miss it.