The New Generation of Data Stores

Storing data is part of every application. The landscape has shifted dramatically in the last years, because of the cloud providers/hyperscalers. The race of storing ever-growing data at a cheaper price is bottomless and resulting in a seismic shift using hyper scale infrastructure in modern data stores, that are only running in cloud environments. The most visible result of this is the common mention of splitting storage and computing, but that is only part of it.

This talk covers concepts in new data stores to reduce costs while staying competitive from a performance and pricing standpoint as well as the implications for developers.

Data stores are treated as being just there without knowing the implications of how they are run or developed or what the drawbacks of a pure cloud based data store are.

You can also read a corresponding blog post at https://spinscale.de/posts/2022-08-02-the-new-generation-data-stores.html

Transcript

1. New Generation of Data Stores Alexander Developer Reelsen & Advocate Web Twitter Mastodon Email Email spinscale.de @spinscale @spinscale@mastodon.social alr@spinscale.de alexander.reelsen@firebolt.io
2. Agenda Cloud native shift Splitting Storage & Compute Impact for cloud providers Impact for your business Impact for developers
3. About me Databases & Distributed systems JVM fan Distributed work proponent Working at Firebolt, a cloud data warehouse to bring data apps to the masses
4. Into the cloud: Lift + shift Your strategy? Your strategy for databases? Consume more cloud services over time?
5. Data stores in the cloud Hosted by the cloud provider Minor modifications & version lock-in Hosted by the database provider Version lock-in Hosted by yourself Upgrade complexity Maintenance work
6. Data store architecture - Single system Single system handling reads & writes No coordination required Easy handling of transactions SPOF Scaling strategy: Scale-up Example: Postgres
7. Architecture - Decouple reads and writes Decouple reads from writes Some coordination required Leader/follower architecture SPOF Complexity moves to the client (several endpoints) Scaling strategy: Scale-up for writes, scale-out for reads Example: Postgres
8. Architecture - Sharding & Replication Keep copies of data in cluster, read scalability Split data across cluster, write scalability No SPOF (at the price of coordination), zero-downtime upgrades Scaling strategy: Scale-out Complexity, coordination, maintenance More machines to keep data safe, duplicating writes Example: Elasticsearch
9. Architecture - Sharding & Replication Reads and writes are not decoupled Performance impact on load shift Heterogenous clusters/Tiering (hot, warm, cold, frozen)
10. Architecture - Streaming Streaming platforms as buffer Decouples writes Increased cycle time from event generation to storage Increases architecture complexity
11. What's the goal? Decouple reads & writes => independent scalability Write data once Share storage among readers Minimal coordination Replace tiers with tasks Cross region replication Cost reduction
12. OHAI hyperscalers Major advancements in cloud services Object storages improved on durability, semantics & speed, reducing the requirement of replication within your application Significant price drops (1TB S3 $23 a month, Cloudflare $16, Backblaze $5)
13. Hyperscalers rule the data world ... have the biggest incentive to drive down cost of services ... have the biggest incentive to scale down to zero ... have always been drivers for data store change ... are a couple of years ahead
14. Scale to zero Runtime environments: AWS Lambda (2014!), Google Cloud Run Databases: AWS Aurora (2018!), GCP AlloyDB, CockroachDB Drive-by effect: Pay per use
15. Scale to zero - data store requirements Shut down an instance without losing data Quick start-up, single digit seconds Split storage & compute
16. Storage Share storage among instances Concurrent read access (free!) Concurrent write access (locking!) Slower than local storage!
17. Become object storage smart Full table scan? aaaaaah Optimize for object storage access patterns Smarter query plans will not just mean less CPU/IO but lower the bill Assign exact costs to queries & inserts
18. Compute Indexing and querying can be split No activity allows shutting down Distributed System with shared storage (consistency/transactions) Merging/Vacuuming can now be another compute instance Local storage acts as cache, bigger compute means bigger cache
19. Increased latency as an acceptable tradeoff Transactional writes need to be duplicated or waited for on the object storage (WAL) Batch friendlier Not suitable for (milli)second latency
20. Increased latency as an acceptable tradeoff We ultimately decided that a few hundred milliseconds increase in the median latency was the right decision for our customers to save seconds, tens of seconds, and hundreds of seconds of p95/p99/max latency, respectively. Richard Artoul about Husky, Datadog Event Storage
21. Data Stores Splitting Storage & Compute ClickHouse (analytics) CockroachDB (distributed SQL) Firebolt (cloud data warehouse) Neon (postgres extension) Quickwit (log analytics & search) SingleStore (analytics) Yellowbrick (data warehouse) Yugabyte (distributed SQL)
22. Data Stores Splitting Storage & Compute Amazon RedShift Google BigQuery (2012!) Snowflake
23. Elasticsearch separate compute from storage to simplify your cluster topology Stateless — your new state of find with Elasticsearch
24. Cloud Native Lucene-Based Search Engines nrtSearch by Yelp KalDB by Slack Kafka, Zookeeper, S3
25. Retrofitting is tough! After undertaking a multi-month proof-of-concept and experimental phase Stateless — your new state of find with Elasticsearch
26. Why are they doing it? Stay competitive in pricing to the hyperscalers Provide economically feasible many TB/PB storage engines Reduce resource consumption Point-in-time recovery Fork your data , but cheap Differentiator in SaaS offering
27. Downsides of this trend
28. Hyperscalers — a threat to Open Source? Problem: Hyperscalers & other companies offer open source software as SaaS without contributing back (to VC backed projects) Relicensing: Mongo, Elastic, Confluent, Graylog, Grafana, Redis BSL: CockroachDB, Couchbase Forks: Opensearch Good read: Righteous, Expedient, Wrong
29. Hyperscalers — a threat to Open Source? OSS monetization moves to SaaS monetization (investor driven) Open Source vs. Open Code Future: Less open source, partial open source, closed source control planes? More blackboxed systems? Different compatibility guarantees - wire protocol, SQL
30. Development becomes more complex New generation of data stores will not run on all cloud providers Threat to DigitalOcean, Scaleway, Scalingo, Vultr, OVH New generation of data stores will not run locally Testing Fast feedback Offline development Preproduction systems (just kidding!) Cheap CI runs
31. Debugging Much more blackbox IOPS/bandwidth from remote storage Network speed Performance stability and predictability
32. Writer Data Data Data Object storage Architecture
33. Writer Data Data Data Object storage Reader Architecture
34. Writer Data Data Data Object storage Reader Reader Reader Architecture
35. Writer Writer Writer Data Data Data Object storage Reader Reader Reader Architecture
36. Writer Writer Writer Data Data Data Object storage Reader Reader Reader Coordinator Architecture
37. Coordination - Append only When is a write done ? Multi file moves are not atomic Notify readers of new data
38. Coordination - Updates & Deletes No in place updates Append + Mark as deleted Notify readers of new data Local storage cache invalidation
39. Coordination - Cleanup/Vacuum Remove unused data Remove data marked as deleted Compact to bigger segments supporting better compression How to remove data, that is in use ? No notion if inodes
40. Coordinator Gets notified when data is ready to be queried Notifices about new data to query Triggers Merging/Vacuuming Needs to persist its state in case of crash? Coordinator might be embedded into another role
41. Summary Cloud only data store trend will continue System will be able to store more data, PBs as commodity Resource consumption for CI & development is an unsolved problem Offline development will cease to exist (cloud IDEs on the rise)
42. Discuss! Thanks for listening! Alexander Developer Reelsen & Advocate Web Twitter Mastodon Email Email spinscale.de @spinscale @spinscale@mastodon.social alr@spinscale.de alexander.reelsen@firebolt.io
43. Where can I learn more? CMU Database Talks Book: Understanding Distributed Systems Book: Designing Data Intensive Applications The Firebolt Cloud Data Warehouse Whitepaper Article: Separating compute and storage, from 2019 BigQuery under the hood, from 2016
44. Where can I learn more? This talk as a blog post spinscale.de - my blog
45. Discuss! Thanks for listening! Alexander Developer Reelsen & Advocate Web Twitter Mastodon Email Email spinscale.de @spinscale @spinscale@mastodon.social alr@spinscale.de alexander.reelsen@firebolt.io