People to build it

Our first endeavor after founding Momento was to assemble an incredible team. We got lucky! We handcrafted a small, nimble group—and we hit the ground running, together. The simplest thing we could do to give customers a taste of true serverless was a key-value service. 

All the complexities around number of nodes, benchmarking, replication, instrumentation, alarming, capacity management, etc., are abstracted away by three simple API calls: ^{createCache()}, ^set(), and ^get(). The small surface area brought focus, enabling us to repeat the rigorous operational excellence we learned building DynamoDB. We built a modular service capable of supporting purpose-built engines like Pelikan and RocksDB. This focus allowed us to mature quickly enough to become an official launch partner for Google Cloud’s new Tau T2A Arm-based VMs, demonstrating 2ms p999 latencies on a 16-core VM with 1M+ requests per second (RPS). We delivered quality—and the foundation to rapidly iterate on features that our customers asked for. 

People to build it with

Over the past 6 months, we have been working with customers and listening intently to their needs. To our delight, they love the simplicity of Momento—and our emphasis on operational excellence has earned us production workloads at customers like CBS, MaxPreps, ZigZaGame, and Wyze. It’s incredibly fulfilling to see customers getting more productive by replacing the operational pain in their caching infrastructure with the delightful experience of Momento Cache. Our customers have turned into believers, cheering us on with passion and promoting us to their colleagues across the industry. They are truly design partners. They tell us what they love, and most importantly, they tell us what they don’t love—bluntly. We got lucky again!

Existing caches are a big hodgepodge of features with varying amounts of usage, too big for our nimble team to take on and do well. Turns out, most of our customers don’t need hundreds of APIs. Instead, they prefer an intuitive API with basic capabilities. We are listening intently—and adding functionality in a deliberate, thoughtful manner.

Our customers gave us feedback on collection data types (CDTs)—they helped us realize dictionaries, sets, and lists unblock numerous workloads. Momento is transforming beyond simple key-value into a datastore that offers flexibility and scalability, handling all infrastructure management. Today, we are launching the first three CDTs—but we are just getting started. In the coming months, we expect to launch more high-quality features at breakneck velocity.

We look forward to hearing more about your datastore needs! Try Momento collection data types today and join us on Discord to share what you want to see next.

For more perspectives on the new CDTs, check out Allen’s blog on how to use them—and read about how ZigZaGame leveraged the feature and Momento Cache to power their real-time, in-game chat platform.

Daniela Miao

Author

Daniela Miao is the Co-Founder of Momento, where she’s humbled everyday by her awesome teammates! Previously, she led Platform Engineering at Lightstep, where she launched their new Metrics Product. She was also tech lead at AWS DynamoDB, and released cross-region replication. Daniela has spoken at many events including re:Invent, QCon, and Kubecon. At Momento, she works on distributed system performance, observability, security, and the intersection of engineering with business.

Khawaja Shams

Author

Khawaja is the CEO and Co-Founder of Momento. He is passionate about investing in people, setting a bold vision, and team execution. Khawaja has experience at AWS where he owned DynamoDB, and subsequently owned product and engineering for all 7 of the AWS Media Services. He was awarded the prestigious NASA Early Career Medal for his contributions to the Mars Rovers.