Snapple : A distributed, fault-tolerant, in-memory key-value store using Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types
Johan A. Stenberg · KTH Publication Database DiVA (KTH Royal Institute of Technology) · 2016
As services grow and receive more traffic, data resilience through replication becomes increasingly important. Modern large-scale Internet services such as Facebook, Google and Twitter serve millions of users concurrently. Replication is a vital component of distributed systems. Eventual consistency and Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) are suggested as an alternative to strong consistency systems. This thesis implements and evaluates Snapple, a distributed, fault-tolerant, in-memory key-value database based on CRDTs running on the Java Virtual Machine. Snapple supports two kinds of CRDTs, an optimized implementation of the OR-Set and version vectors. Performance measurements show that the Snapple system is significantly faster than Riak, a persistent database based on CRDTs, but has a factor 5x - 2.5x lower throughput than Redis, a popular in-memory key-value database written in C. Snapple is a prototype-implementation but might be a viable alternative to Redis if the user wants the consistency guarantees CRDTs provide.