Aerospike: Up and Running

Preface

The last decade has seen the rise of many new database technologies to address the needs of the internet and mobile applications that have become ubiquitous. These systems were built to satisfy consumers whose behavior has changed drastically, as they now expect real-time services from every enterprise with which they are interacting. As a result, there has been a huge increase in the number of new database technologies invented to help make this happen.

In this book, we present a modern, high-performance distributed database system that has all of the important features of traditional database systems like strong consistency, durability, and availability while also providing real-time distributed transactional and query capabilities at scale for a wide variety of real-time applications that previous generations of technologies could not satisfactorily handle.

The people who will benefit from this book are those who want to learn how to rapidly develop real-time applications in the service of millions of consumers and quickly ramp up to internet scale. Developing such applications on Aerospike lets you analyze more data in real time to make better decisions within strict, time-bound service-level agreements (SLAs). Aerospike enables you to minimize your per-transaction costs by leveraging the latest in hardware and cloud infrastructure. It increases availability by using synchronous and asynchronous replication mechanisms, preserving strong consistency while maximizing availability and minimizing replication costs. And it handles multiple data models on the same database platform. All of this adds up to an opportunity to create powerful new applications.

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Acknowledgments

We’ve had a great time working on this book together and, as a group, we would like to first thank our fellow authors. A group project like this can be great or awful entirely depending on who you’re doing it with. Having four people from three different companies that got along famously and all pulled in the same direction made the project far more enjoyable and the end result a better book. We’d also like to express our gratitude to all of the tech reviewers, especially Ido Barkan and Peter Milne, who really dove into the details and gave us useful feedback. Most of all, we’d all like to thank Gary O’Brien, our infinitely patient O’Reilly editor, who shepherded us through this project in the best tradition of cat herders everywhere. Without his help and encouragement, this project would probably still be in progress.

V. Srinivasan

For the past 15 years, the work at Aerospike has been my singular focus and it would have been impossible for me to do this without the help I received from countless people both within and outside Aerospike, especially my wife, Viji. I’d like to thank my cofounder, Brian Bulkowski, who invited me to join him in this project in 2009. While it is impractical to list everyone who has contributed to Aerospike, I’d like to specially recognize Andrew Gooding and Sunil Sayyaparaju for their brilliant technical contributions that have largely shaped Aerospike into the product that it is today.

Tim Faulkes

There are so many people to thank who helped make this book a reality. My wife, Jordan, who encouraged me and put up with the long hours needed to write this. Piyush Gupta for keeping me honest on technical details and discussing some of the data modeling techniques with me. Evan Cummack and Matt Bushell for reviewing chapters and discussing the structure of the book. The whole engineering team at Aerospike for creating an awesome, robust product with special shout-outs to Brian Nichols, Andrew Gooding, and Kevin Porter. And, of course, the O’Reilly team, especially Gary O’Brien and Andy Kwan.

Albert Autin

To my wife, Karamia, thank you for your support throughout this adventure. Together, we’ve pursued our dreams, even when they’ve taken us in unexpected directions.

To my brother, Jerome, and his wife, Lauren, thank you for your sacrifices and guiding me through my formative years. I’ll always look back fondly on our nights spent playing Shostakovich and The Cure, cooking quiche and pot pies, and leaping into Barton Springs.

Thanks to Tim Faulkes for educating me on the deeper aspects of Aerospike back in 2015, Meher Tendjoukian for your assistance during those long support calls, and Andrew Gooding for patiently listening to my untenable ideas. My gratitude extends to the entire Aerospike team for their remarkable product, support, and vision.

Paige Roberts

Thanks to Jess Haberman, my first O’Reilly editor, who gave me confidence that I could do this technical book writing thing. And many thanks to my husband Joe for putting up with me spending tons of time plinking away on a keyboard and ignoring him. I learned so much from Gary and the writing team. It’s been a privilege.