Momento is built on Pelikan, Twitter’s open source caching framework. Our cofounder Daniela (@dymnxzvf) and Twitter Principal Engineer Yao Yue (@thinkingfish)—a core part of Twitter’s Pelikan Cache team—join the Open Source Startup Podcast to discuss what it’s been like for Momento to launch on top of an open source project owned by the Twitter team. Daniela also shares a very helpful metaphor for delineating between caching options and the group discusses messaging and positioning for technical companies, the importance of a vibrant developer community, and more!

Memcached, KeyDB, Redis, DragonflyDB… They’re all engines. And to the end consumer who wants to get from point A to point B, just having an engine without the plane is not useful at all.

So, in order to get there, the next step of course is that you have to have an airplane that does everything else…, which in this analogy is managed caching services: Amazon ElastiCache, Google Memorystore, Redis Labs… They give you a mechanism through which you can get from point A to point B.

However, only an airplane is a lot of work: ongoing maintenance costs, upfront costs, configuration costs, etc. With Momento, we aim to provide the actual airline service—the end-to-end experience where we just focus on getting you from point A to point B in the fastest time possible without you having to worry about what kind of engine you’re using, changing the seating arrangements, etc.

Daniela Miao