Cloud Computing: Out in the Open – The Abandoned Facebook Tech That Now Helps Power Apple

Grazed from Wired. Author: Klint Finley.

Matt Pfeil drove from Austin to San Antonio with only one thing in mind: stopping Jonathan Ellis from quitting his job at the cloud computing company Rackspace. Ellis had emailed his colleagues, including Pfeil, to say he planned on leaving Rackspace to start a new company around Cassandra, a sweeping open-source database originally created by Facebook to help juggle the scads of digital information generated by its popular social network.

Pfeil had worked with Cassandra at Rackspace, so he knew the value of the project, but he didn’t want Rackspace to lose Ellis. When he wasn’t writing code, Pfeil helped with the company’s recruiting efforts, and that made it especially difficult to see Ellis leave. The two met for lunch at a tiny Thai restaurant in San Antonio, and Pfeil brought a long list of reasons why Ellis shouldn’t quit. But soon, his plan started to backfire…

When Pfeil pointed out that Ellis didn’t have anyone to run the business side of the startup, Ellis invited him to join the new company too. “When he asked me, I started thinking about what I wanted to do with my life,” Pfeil remembers. “I was in my 20s. I hadn’t started a family. It was the best time to do a startup. I didn’t decide right then, but he planted the seeds.”…

Read more from the source @ http://www.wired.com/2014/08/datastax/