Pierre Zemb from Clever Cloud - The Consensus<br>The Consensus Weekly<br>Get new deep dives, plus jobs and funding in software infrastructure, free in your inbox every week.Subscribeinterviews<br>Pierre Zemb from Clever Cloud<br>Pierre Zemb is a staff engineer at Clever Cloud where he's building data layers API-compatible with services like Redis, PostgreSQL, and etcd on top of FoundationDB.By Phil Eaton·June 18, 2026<br>You are getting early access to this article as a subscriber. Your support makes articles like this possible. Thank you.This article is part of a series interviewing developers (not founders, not executives) working on software infrastructure to understand their work, how they got here, the projects they’re proud of, the incidents they’ve learned from, and what they’re curious about.Pierre (LinkedIn, Twitter) has spent his career at European cloud companies: first OVHcloud and now Clever Cloud where they've invested heavily in (and Pierre leads the development of) data services on top of FoundationDB.You were at the cloud provider OVHcloud for a while. What did you work on there?#<br>I spent around 6 years at OVHcloud, starting with an internship in Poland on the public Cloud team, where I worked on data collection and visualization for VM monitoring (not the storage side), then got hired to work on the Metrics Data Platform in 2016. It was built around Warp 10, which helped us host all telemetry from the company, from DC temperature to virtual machines' telemetry.At its peak OVHcloud was generating 2.5 million writes per second and 6.5 million reads per second on the underlying HBase cluster. I started as a Go/Java developer there, then I learned operations by taking care of Hadoop and HBase (and being paged about it!), which was not an easy task, but it was truly rewarding! We were between 4 and 6 people at the time doing both development and operations, and thanks to this, we were a highly focused team.After Metrics I worked on ioStream, our queuing-as-a-service vision built on Apache Pulsar, which got cancelled, and then on Managed Kubernetes, where I tried to improve etcd's performance before joining Clever Cloud.And what are you up to now at Clever Cloud?#<br>Well, multiple things to be fair! Clever Cloud is a self-funded, profitable European cloud provider. We started as a Heroku/App Engine alternative for developers, and over time we have grown into something broader: the same stack we run as a public cloud is the one customers can install in their own datacenters or fully air-gapped, with the full catalog of managed services on top. When I joined we were around 25 people, and we are almost a hundred now, with a customer base that goes from small developers all the way up to the EU itself.Clever Cloud is also an engineering-driven company that ships a lot of its own infrastructure (the Sōzu load-balancer, the Exherbo Linux distribution, and others), and that culture is what made building our own data services line possible.I was hired to create and lead Materia, our serverless databases line, to provide fully serverless, managed and scalable services. The whole strategy is to use FoundationDB, a distributed key-value store that is highly scalable and correct, and that we can use as a foundation to build layers, so any data service can sit on top.On top of Materia I'm also on the dist-sys on-call rotation, and one of my newer missions is to spread simulation testing across the engineering organization. In practice, I'm in pretty much everything that touches distributed systems and data at Clever Cloud.How did you get into programming?#<br>It is actually a funny story, because I wrote my first Hello, world in C in September 2010, when I joined a French engineering school to work on electronics and airplanes. Two weeks into the first electronics course I discovered that I wasn't passionate enough about electronics to make a career in it. Fortunately, the school also had a strange little C course on the side that I could not stop thinking about.The thing that turned the hobby into a career was a part-time internship at a French bank called Arkea. My tutor saw I was curious about the systems side of their platform and gave me a chance to work directly on Hadoop, Kafka, and a small test HBase cluster, with a real production dataset to play with. I cannot thank him enough, because he is the single reason distributed systems became my focus.So every data offering at Clever Cloud runs on FoundationDB?#<br>Not yet, but the list keeps growing every few months. The first layer we shipped was Materia KV, our Redis-compatible service, which we picked as a bootstrap target. The protocol is well-known and the semantics are simple enough that we could focus our energy on the toolbox underneath, which handles all the tough work (multi-tenancy, schema evolution, hierarchy of key-values, ...).The second layer was Materia etcd, a much harder beast with watches, leases, revisions, and which powers our Kubernetes product. We also...