FoundationDB's Lesson: A Fast Key-Value Store Is Not Enough

Re:FoundationDB's Lesson: A Fast Key-Value Store Is Not Enough by jhugg on Wednesday April 01, 2015 @05:47PM (#9307162)

So there is a point here. Apple is trying to compete with Google. Google has some amazing distributed systems, including Spanner, F1, MillWheel, etc... Apple has Cassandra and other OSS/COTS software. Not to ding Cassandra, but this is a problem for Apple. We've seen repeatedly that at huge scale, it often makes sense to own (or control) the software. See Facebook and LinkedIn as well.

Now I don't think FDB (the product) is the answer, at least not in the short term. There are more problems scaling it to Apple's use case than there are working around Cassandra's lack of ACID.

So I'm convinced the value of FDB is the experience in the engineers' brains. Apple need brains to run Cassandra, but also to figure out if Cassandra is the right long term path. Build, buy, adapt? It takes veterans to make the right call.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:FoundationDB's Lesson: A Fast Key-Value Store Is Not Enough by threeseed on Wednesday April 01, 2015 @06:55PM (#9307563)

Apple runs Cassandra at scale today. It underpins most of iTunes Match and last time I checked all your iCloud data was sharded and stored in Cassandra. They run one of the latest clusters in the world (at least the last time I spoke with Datastax). Cassandra is a pretty easy database to run and scale and Datastax is just down the road from them to help.

My guess is that FoundationDB is replacing their Teradata installation. Better to buy the company and invest heavily in it then let it not met it's full potential as a small startup.

[ Parent | on HN ]