Origins in CDN
Observability

Nothing inspires innovation like shared suffering. Marty Kagan and Hasan Alayli lived the same problem, the punishing cost of storing the data their businesses depended on, and set out to fix it. That’s the short version of how Hydrolix came to be. Here’s the longer one.

In 2008, Marty Kagan, a veteran of Cisco and Akamai, co-founded Cedexis, a pioneer in observability for content delivery networks (CDNs). Its flagship product, Radar, measured the quality of experience CDNs delivered to their customers, helping them decide which CDN to run on in which country and make smarter routing decisions.

Hasan Alayli joined the Cedexis engineering team in 2012, after his own stint at Cisco.

As Cedexis grew, a hard truth came into focus: storing the logs the business ran on was becoming one of its largest expenses, second only to payroll. That cost stayed with Marty and Hasan even as they moved on, Hasan to Splunk and Marty to Fastly, and after Citrix acquired Cedexis in early 2018.

At Splunk, Hasan saw the same problem from the inside, at a different scale. He knew it could be solved. So he set out to build a real-time data platform that wouldn’t force customers to choose between keeping their data and affording it. His first call was to Marty, who had lived the same cost problem and had already built and sold a company. That call is where Hydrolix started.

With Marty as CEO and Hasan as CTO, along with founding engineer Rabih Saliba, the team set out to eliminate the compromises the industry had taught everyone to accept: runaway costs, slow queries, fragile clusters, unmaintainable scale, the pressure to throw data away, and forced trade-offs.

The early years weren’t easy. There’s an old joke that every database is an overnight success ten years in the making, and for the first three years, the team scraped by, learning what worked, landing early customers, and surviving the near-death moments most startups know well.

Then it worked. Hydrolix went from 4 customers to more than 650 in 24 months, proving customers were never willing to settle for deleting their data. They’d just never been given another option.