CTO interview: Kenta Yasukawa, connecting the Internet of Things
Kenta founded Soracom after a brilliant career solving problems at scale in large companies. It made him realize that communicating with a big number of different types of devices is a problem encountered by many. With his team, they built a way to easily build on top of cloud infrastructure your next connected device.
We’ve truly entered the age of the Internet of Things (IoT). My bike is connected, my heating is connected, some people have fridges that are connected, etc. How does Soracom add value?
When it comes to IoT, it is important to connect devices. When doing that it is important to optimize the cost of devices and communication because you usually have to deploy thousands of devices. So, if you can reduce the cost per device, it results in huge savings.
Our platform offers connectivity. We offer cellular connections and other different technologies to connect devices to the cloud environment. On top of that, we have a bunch of features that make it easier for developers and innovators to build the systems for IoT and make the communication among devices more efficient. As a result, we reduce the total cost of ownership.
Is it simply a bunch of HTTP requests?
I would like to give an example. If you try to send a few bytes of data from a temperature sensor or GPS tracker over HTTP, you have to first set up a TCP connection and then put a bunch of HTTP headers at the beginning, and then you can finally deliver the bytes that you want to send.
In this typical use case, you would have to send many packets between the device and servers and you would end up paying cellular data costs. You would also place demands on CPU resources and memory, along with the battery, if you are running a device with a battery. At Soracom, we provide the connection, but also we offer a feature that reduces the data overhead.
We have an endpoint in our platform that can authenticate the sender and receive data. So, just by sending a packet, say a UDP packet, a device can securely deliver data to the endpoint and get authenticated. We can then take the payload out and call the HTTP API on the cloud side so that the device can use low overhead protocol and still integrate with cloud services. That’s one example of what we do to reduce costs.
On the hardware side, do you provide a library to install Soracom, and then you forward it to the company’s platform?
We do not require the hardware side to use Soracom specific library. As far as the hardware uses our connectivity, we can authenticate the sender and allow to access Soracom services. For example, if your bike had a cellular connection request to the local carrier, we authenticate the request by using SIM and establishes a connection to our cloud-based telecom platform.
Once that connection is established, the hardware can use standard protocols such as HTTP, MQTT, TCP/UDP raw socket to send data to Soracom. We can forward the request either to the Internet or to your cloud provider (AWS, GCP, Azure) as we have a cloud-agnostic integration to these services. We can also allow a customer to create their own private network for their servers and devices. Once set up, the devices can securely talk to their cloud back-end or these machines and devices and terminals can communicate with each other in a network isolated from the public Internet.
I find your career path interesting: you’re from Japan, worked in multiple countries, and various industries. Can you please expand on that, and how it shaped the manager you are today?
I worked as a researcher, at Ericsson, and I was working on the connected home, connected car, and similar types of projects. After that, I joined Amazon Web Services as a solutions architect and worked with various companies that built systems on top of the cloud. So one thing that I realised was that everything can be built better and more reliable and more scalable by using cloud technologies.
I thought the telecom infrastructure like cellular core networks should be able to be built on top of the cloud. That would enable more scalable, reliable and capable cellular core network. Thus we started by building the software-based cellular network on top of AWS Cloud and we launched the connectivity service for IoT.
What’s the biggest struggle you’ve encountered as a company founder?
When we started, we were nobody. To launch our service, we had to work with large telecom companies to establish the relationship and integrate with their network. That was a big hurdle at the beginning. So I’m so thankful for the partners that we worked with.
Later on, as we started to grow, we wanted to have more partners in different countries. After we got traction in Japan, the next step was to find a partner who can be a global partner. Getting traction in Japan didn’t necessarily mean we could find a partner outside of Japan. So that was the next challenge.
It was not easy to find such a partner, though. I flew to the US and Europe and various other places, but couldn’t make it happen.
Ultimately, we met Jun Tosabayashi, our global carrier partnership director at that time. He successfully found a partner in Europe and that partnership built our foundation to go global. I’m so thankful to him.
Amazon is known to have a strong culture. How much of the Amazon culture is present in Soracom?
That’s a great question too. When I joined Amazon, what I learned was that culture is so important in a company. Amazon published what they call “leadership principles”. When we started our company, we also built our own leadership statements that can be the “DNA of the company.”
That way, even when we grow, we could maintain the culture. That was the right decision we made when we launched the company, and every member of our company has that in mind when we make decisions. For example, it starts with customer centricity, which is something we all inherited from Amazon.
That means a lot in engineering as well: as an engineer, I could think about cool tech I would like to implement, but it doesn’t necessarily mean it has a value for customers. Since our engineering culture is also centred around our leadership statements, we listen to our customers and work backward We always ask ourselves, “What value does this feature offer to whom?” and “What pain point does this new feature solve?”
What do you think of using agencies and contractors? Up to what point are you ready to outsource?
At Soracom, we don’t do that much. Our engineers are all full-time employees and the reason behind it is indeed the culture-fit. When it comes to building or designing something, you need the philosophy and culture behind it. It’s difficult to rely on short term contractors on that part.
When we hire someone in our team we have multiple interviews to make sure that skills level are a match, but also we make sure the candidate has the culture fit for our company.
We don’t say we never use the contractors, as sometimes we do, for some specific projects, but mainly we work with those full-time employees who have culture-fit and the same leadership statements in mind.
What is Soracom’s tech stack?
Because I worked at Amazon and the vision when we started the company was to build telecom infrastructure on top of the cloud environment, we picked AWS as the fundamental stack. We have carefully designed a cloud-native cellular core network architecture that spans over multiple availability zones and regions and is horizontally scalable and resilient. We have cellular core network elements implemented as a distributed system and those network elements are backed by micro services as depicted in the diagram in the above.
Since the beginning, Amazon DynamoDB is used for our DB layer so that we can dial up and down the throughput any time. We have leveraged AWS managed services whenever possible such as AWS Lambda, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon SQS and Amazon S3.
When we launched those micro services were running on Amazon ElasticBeanstalk. We have now containerised micro-services and been running on Amazon ECS.
And in terms of programming languages?
Programming languages: my engineering team can choose the language or framework that is suitable for the particular microservices they’re working on. So, we don’t actually force certain programming language or framework to the entire company, we let them choose. We have Java, JavaScript, Golang, and some components in C.
Developers and engineers like to try something new all the time, so it helps with recruiting: because when working at Soracom, you have the opportunity to try different languages and technologies.
If you want to connect with Kenta, click here.
To learn more about Soracom, visit their website: soracom.io
If you’re a techie working on something exciting or you simply want to have a chat, get in touch with me. I’m currently CTO at Kolleno.com
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