Aerospike’s Journey to Full Transactional Consistency
Aerospike has always been a fast database, capable of reading and writing huge amounts of data with very tight latencies. With today’s launch of Aerospike version 8, the NoSQL database company has completed its journey to handle the flip side of the enterprise coin: Ensuring full transactional consistency.
Aerospike’s journey to delivering full ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability) guarantees began in 2018. In that year, the company shipped a release of the distributed database that guaranteed strong consistency for individual reads and writes at the record level, or linearizability.
However, since one transaction may utilize multiple reads and writes, the transaction as a whole did not have consistency guarantees. That meant that customers that demanded transactional consistency had to write additional application code to ensure the integrity of transactions.
With version 8, Aerospike has expanded its consistency guarantees to support the entire transactions. That so-called serializability now provides consistency guarantees for multiple changes to multiple records within the same transaction, says Aerospike CTO and founder Srini Srinivasan.
Have Your Cake…
Support for full ACID transactions is an important feature for some types of customers, particularly large banks and financial services institutions. While Aerospike has had success in that market, those customers have requested Aerospike deliver native support for transactions to alleviate their burdens in supporting the code themselves, Srinivasan said.
…And Eat It Too
The ACID guarantees are provided for all data types supported by Aerospike, from key-value and JSON documents all the way to graph and vector data types, Srinivasan said.
"It’s all about not having the application writer have to solve these problems at their level and for the database," he said. "We use the transaction support underneath, which enables the whole system to become more robust."
Some of Aerospike’s customers in telecommunications could streamline their application architecture by upgrading to version 8. For instance, one telecommunications company with multiple lines of business is forced to maintain separate accounts for the same customer because of limited support for serial transactions in the database. With Aerospike version 8, they’ll be able to combine those accounts into a single record, Srinivasan said.
There are two types of customers that will really be able to use the ACID transaction support, the CTO said. The first are existing customers, such as the telecommunications firm, who are already running at scale but are forced to write complex code in the application to meet business requirements.
"The other ones are people who always needed these kinds of transactional features with strict serializability, but were not able to use Aerospike for high-performance applications," Srinivasan said. "Those would be completely brand new customers…on the consumer-oriented and real-time application space."
A Legacy of High Performance
Large cost-savings could be had for customers who tried to speed up traditional relational databases that offered strong consistency guarantees but lacked the scale of a fast database like Aerospike.
"We have cases where we have reduced system sizes from 4,000 nodes to 400 nodes by eliminating a cache layer and also compressing the server," Srinivasan said. "That is one of our big differentiations over the years. Comparable systems for real-time performance need to put all their data in DRAM. Aerospike has this technology we call hybrid memory architecture where we use SSDs in real-time to read data."
With the advent of larger SSDs that can hold hundreds of terabytes of data, and sufficient DRAM and indexes, Aerospike has the capability to replace scale-out databases that are 100x bigger. That legacy of high-performance is Aerospike’s bread and butter. In fact, the largest publicly referenceable Aerospike deployment is able to push upwards of 100 million database transactions per second. (But the throughput is even higher for non-publicly referenceable clients, Srinivasan said).
That speed is one reason why the big public cloud companies are working with Aerospike to support workloads that other databases can’t handle, at least not without a significantly larger hardware footprint.
"The kinds of workloads that Aerospike handles, virtually no one else handles," Srinivasan said. "Therefore, all the cloud providers would like to get a piece of the action, if you will, essentially to be able to support their customers on their clouds to run workloads with Aerospike."
Conclusion
Aerospike’s journey to full transactional consistency is a significant milestone in the company’s evolution. With the release of version 8, Aerospike is now able to support a wider range of use cases, including those that require strong consistency guarantees. This is particularly important for customers in the financial services and consumer-facing markets.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What are the benefits of full ACID transactions for Aerospike customers?
A: Full ACID transactions provide guaranteed consistency for multiple changes to multiple records within the same transaction, ensuring the integrity of transactions.
Q: Who will benefit from Aerospike’s full ACID transactions?
A: Existing customers, particularly in the financial services and consumer-facing markets, will benefit from the new feature.
Q: How will Aerospike’s full ACID transactions impact the company’s competitive landscape?
A: The new feature will enable Aerospike to compete more effectively with traditional relational databases, particularly in the financial services and consumer-facing markets.
