Expanding Modernization from Applications to Databases—A Chat with Charles Schwab

Charles Schwab's application modernization journey began with a focus on agility, advancing concepts, driving progress, and bringing products to market. The company's emphasis on addressing client needs led to the adoption of containerized platforms, which enabled quick deployment of workloads across different environments. This, in turn, drove the need for database modernization, as traditional RDBMS databases were not matching the app infrastructure. Charles Schwab discovered distributed SQL by looking for a solution that could scale across zones and regions, handle failure scenarios seamlessly, and provide strong consistency and durability. The company sees distributed SQL fitting into its architecture as a way to bring compute power to its hybrid approach and operate anywhere, with benefits including improved scalability, availability, and data integrity.