ServiceNow and Alibaba.
At ServiceNow, our stack was built on top of MySQL from the beginning. It works for us. We left Oracle® MySQL for MariaDB largely because MariaDB actually seems to work to improve things for its bigger customers.
Also, our SVP of Engineering is now on the MariaDB board.
I don’t see the unique advantages of MySQL compared to current MariaDB, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, CockroachDB, MemSQL, etc.
In my case we switched to MariaDB because it fixed a number of glaring query optimizer failings much sooner than MySQL. And we've stuck with MariaDB because it has been much smoother and confidence-inspiring than MySQL when we used that.
We also use the TokuDB storage engine extensively, which is well supported by MariaDB. Whereas MySQL 8 is going in a very opinionated direction that I personally don't agree with.
Poster here. The tweak here is that MariaDB tested the Optane SSDs with Intel Memory Drive Technology (basically presenting the SSDs as memory to the OS) and as fast storage. Pretty interesting stuff, and it's been fun to help developers get their hands on the tech and give it all a go.
Disclosure: I help manage the lab (hosted by Packet) where we made available the hardware for this testing. If you're interested in testing and sharing your results, check it out here: https://www.acceleratewithoptane.com/
GCP's announcement is pretty exciting, and as more and more developers get their hands on both types of products, we'll see more interesting usages like MariaDB ColumnStore, Memcached, RabbitMQ, Postgres, etc. We have our own ideas, of course, but it's been fun making this all available to developers directly and seeing new ideas come up.
