Aerospike goes Open Source

http://www.aerospike.com/blog/entrepreneurs-break-all-the-rules-aerospike-goes-open-source/

by ZenoArrow • 12 years ago

123 84 12 years ago

ZenoArrow12• 12 years ago

To give some idea of speed...http://www.aerospike.com/blog/aerospike-doubles-in-memory-no...

It's got some impressive responses from people in industry too, check out this post about its use at eBay... http://www.aerospike.com/blog/ebay-helps-retailers-know-your...

ris4• 12 years ago

"To give some idea of speed"

Purported speed. Please, we've all seen enough wildly hyped NoSQL databases now to remain a little cynical, haven't we?

ZenoArrow12• 12 years ago

Here's a benchmark from 2013 from Thumbtack Technology, comparing Aerospike, Cassandra, MongoDB and Couchbase... http://www.odbms.org/2013/01/ultra-high-performance-nosql-be... http://www.odbms.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/NoSQLBenchma...

In this benchmark, Couchbase gets some impressive results, but it does appear that Aerospike is the overall winner when it comes to speed and reliability. Anyway, the code is free to install, it's easy enough to validate the speed claims... http://www.aerospike.com/blog/aerospike-doubles-in-memory-no...

yeukhon2• 12 years ago

The APGL license caught my eyes. Does anyone take this license into account (deciding between an Apache/MIT/BSD DB vs APGL DB) when they use it in their service / software stack.

For example, this openstack thread always keeps me alert using APGL when I am developing a solution. http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2014-Marc...

and here is MongoDB's FAQ explaining APGL in plain English: http://blog.mongodb.org/post/103832439/the-agpl

ZenoArrow12• 12 years ago

I can't see it being an issue. As mentioned in the useful MongoDB link you shared, the licence will require sharing only when modifying the database code, but not require automatic sharing of the rest of the software stack.

Have there been any court cases involving AGPL violations? I wonder if some of Gil Yehuda's fears are partly out of lack of clarity on where the reach of the AGPL ends? For example claiming the MongoDB drivers 'violate the AGPL license', I´d prefer to see a response from GNU on this.

yeukhon2• 12 years ago

Well in the case of companies like Google or Facebook, they might actually modify the database for various of reasons (e.g. internal policy, speed, etc). I don't have first hand experience with modifying databases so I thought I would ask :)

e12e2• 12 years ago

I seem to recall neo4j (could be it was another nosql db/company) had some strange ideas about the agpl. Of course if the drivers are covered by agpl and linked into your application, then you might have to create a new api "border" (eg:HTTP REST) between whatever code you want to license differently and the agpl server. I don't think the agpl should be a problem in most cases - at any rate you don't have to contribute patches up-stream, only to those of your users that ask for the code (if any). Unless upstream is also using your service, that is.

A perhaps more interesting question is how they manage contributions and pull requests - if i'm using the server under agpl, it seems natural to contribute code under agpl. But now that code can't be used in the commercially licensed upstream "fork" unless that fork is sold under the agpl... So either contributors will have to donate code, or sell code to upstream for use in the "closed" project.

I could see that get a bit hairy with user-contributed bug fixes?

gyehuda2• 12 years ago

So far, AGPL has not been tested in court. GPL has. The scope of Derivative Works (reach) has as well (but the case law in this area is more complicated than most open source developers are aware of since copyright law is understood differently based on which federal circuit court hears the case). The more challenging consideration for me is the AGPL/Apache (DB/Driver) method that these companies are using -- and especially when you have Apache licensed community contributions (these apparently violates AGPL's own terms). I see this as an area that can backfire against the open source community -- and indeed I'd also like to know if FSF, SFLC, or GPL-violations takes a position on the use of Apache drivers to AGPL DBs. If so, it would be best for the open source community to know about this soon rather than after many have placed themselves in a position where their best option is to pay the vendors that have somehow managed to achieve lock-in. Ironically, this is the opposite of the goals that many in the open source community endorse. So if FSF takes a strict position on AGPL, it could accidentally result in the opposite of the freedoms we have been working for.

I'm also fascinated when companies use a license and then state in their FAQ that they didn't really mean all the terms of the license. If this comes up in court, the judge might take the FAQ into account and interpret the intent of the licensor, or might just look at the license text itself. It'll be interesting to see what happens. My advice for now is to assume the text of the license to be what the licensor intended and my hope is that companies that use open source licenses simply use the licenses that match what they mean. If they really mean that they want you to pay, they should just be clear about it and people can decide if they want to pay.

seiji• 12 years ago

AGPL is essentially the "corporate coward" license. They want to capture all of your private changes to basically get free (legally mandated, zero "community good will") development resources. Companies think it's "safer" than BSD or straight up GPL because lawyers feel "omgz, source codes, zero cost IP copies, instant competition!"

The next step after AGPL will probably be BrainGPL requiring you to publish all thoughts you have about any code you look at ever.

michaelmior• 12 years ago

You make it sound like it would be better not to open source code at all.

arrryarr4• 12 years ago

You could just pay for a license if you're that paranoid. It's remarkable to what extent people will complain about free not being "free enough". I assume you haven't contributed a line of code to the project, so it's a bit presumptuous to knock it.

throwaway68292• 12 years ago

Where I work[1], AGPL software is strictly and unconditionally forbidden to use for anything, even things that are completely internal and will never see a public user.

The fear that our lawyers have is that, since putting up the software in a service counts as a derived work, our whole software stack (including the stuff we don't open source) will have to be opened along with it. There have to be clear service boundaries between the AGPL software and the stuff we write ourselves, and the lawyers don't trust us to write in appropriate boundaries.

It's really kinda tragic, because we actually do submit source code upstream when we make changes to open source software that we run internally. As in, if it's an OSS product that we just use for some dumb internal automation thing, we'll submit patches if the license is BSD or MIT, but as soon as GPL (especially AGPL) hits anything suddenly the lawyers get paranoid because of what constitutes a "derived work", which can be interpreted as anything that links against the software to make a complete product.

The upshot of this is, if the OSS software is on an unrestrictive license like BSD or apache, we contribute upstream. If it's GPL or especially AGPL, we simply don't touch it, ever.

[1] A very, very well known technology company.

_delirium2• 12 years ago

That's often not an unwelcome side-effect. If you're at a large technology company, making sure companies like yours don't use the free version is a common motivation. Aerospike sells a commercial enterprise license; in that kind of a "dual-license" setup, the GPL/AGPL can function as a useful poison pill to keep from cannibalizing enterprise sales with the free version (where a common alternative would be to just not open-source at all, for fear of that cannibalization).

belorn2• 12 years ago

A lawyers job is to think about all the things that could go wrong and to prepare for that possibility. Their job is to think what would happen if the company goes under, or what if the newly bought property would burn down, or what if the business partnership you just signed up for went sourer. Their job is not do cost-benefit analysis, or even consider how high risk something actually is. Their job is to handle the what-if's.

So the reaction you are talking about is natural behavior of lawyers being exposed to legal documents and contracts. If there is anything that could be interpreted to impact the company, their job is to consider it and think "what-if".

The question comes down to, what is a healhty way to handle the result of lawyers paranoia. Best-practice is to do a cost-benefit analysis and balance the benefits with the insight of the legal advice. Second-worst is to avoid anything with a risk, regardless of benefits, in order to avoid it. Worst choice is to ignore the lawyers. Most companies, including the "very well known technology companies", pick the second-worst option for anything that is not critical to the company survival. Its clearly not the best option, but it keeps the status quo.

richardfontana• 12 years ago

Matt Asay of MongoDB, Inc. (disclosure takes care of Asayroll Rule<tm>) responded to that openstack-dev posting, FWIW: http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2014-Marc...

pwnna• 12 years ago

You know, when I first saw this I thought it's the aerospike engine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerospike_engine

ZenoArrow12• 12 years ago

That's pretty cool in its own right, thanks pwnna.

wlesieutre• 12 years ago

Same here, I'm assuming that's what the name is borrowed from.

ZenoArrow12• 12 years ago

Worth pointing out that unlike some NoSQL engines, Aerospike does have access to its own query language (AQL) that is syntatically similar to SQL... https://docs.aerospike.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=3807...

From the AQL query documentation you have... SELECT name, age FROM users.profiles WHERE age BETWEEN 20 AND 29 ...which is pretty easy to understand.

There´s also a Python client (Apache licensed)... https://github.com/aerospike/aerospike-client-python

ZenoArrow12• 12 years ago

This video shows off how easy it is to manage, pretty impressive (I don't work for Aerospike by the way, I'm just happy to share about it)... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CF83TmR-NME

TheCondor• 12 years ago

It's an impressive cache. Last I looked at it they were using lua and it looked like they were going squarely after mongo

ZenoArrow12• 12 years ago

The core code is written in C, but they're definitely using Lua in places, I believe they've incorporated some code from AlchemyDB... https://code.google.com/p/alchemydatabase/

From what I've read it could easily surpass Mongo, just look at the cost savings... http://www.datanami.com/2013/09/06/aerospike_says_secret_to_... "The second comparison (a video ad serving platform) had much bigger requirements, including a 5TB database processing 500,000 TPS. The hybrid SSD-DRAM setup running the AeroSpike database was able to handle the load with just 14 servers, at a total cost of $322,000, compared to 186 servers using NoSQL running on clusters of servers that use a lot of DRAM and cost $5.6 million."

They´re ACID compliant as well, which Mongo is not (AFAIK)... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnxj77NNEeg

ris4• 12 years ago

"just look at the cost savings"

Purported cost savings.

nlavezzo2• 12 years ago

They don't have ACID transactions. We had to put up a page to dispel some of the misuse of the term ACID. Aerospike's excerpt:

"Aerospike does not provide true ACID transactions. Just like Cassandra 2.0, Aerospike only provides compare and set, and misleadingly labels it as ACID."

https://foundationdb.com/acid-claims

meritt• 12 years ago

I don't think this press release has nearly enough buzzwords.

jaseemabid• 12 years ago

Yep. Everything about Aerospike so far have been filled with buzzwords. There was a flash talk by an employee of theirs recently at a conference in Bangalore and it was just marketing BS. I'm still skeptical.

arrryarr4• 12 years ago

I think the independently written article from AppLovin (link above) points to it actually working as promised.

rasz_pl• 12 years ago

I dont know, are they web scale?

shabinesh• 12 years ago

Aerospike guys were at a big data workshop at Bangalore last week. It's performance is pretty impressive. They claimed about >1M TPS with just 3 nodes and compared it with Couchdb which is claimed to achieve 1M TPS in 330 nodes. But unclear about their benchmarking method.

manojlds• 12 years ago

Fifth Elephant - https://fifthelephant.in/2014/

riyer3• 12 years ago

I believe that was cassandra... latest from netflix on that http://techblog.netflix.com/2014/07/revisiting-1-million-wri...

remon5• 12 years ago

"But unclear about their benchmarking method". That can be said for every single performance claim they make. There's a rather distinct lack of objective facts.

blitzprog• 12 years ago

How does this perform in comparison to Riak (cluster, v2.0)?

weitzj• 12 years ago

If the server uses the AGPL instead of the GPL, why does it matter that the clients are under an Apache License? I thought if you use the AGPL you have to contribute back the client code as well, when you use the server remotely.

teddyh• 12 years ago

I’m sorry, but people seem to believe all manner of wild and crazy things about the AGPL – this means that you have to back up your claims with references.

DoubleMalt• 12 years ago

That is not true.

If you expose an service based on AGPL licensed service, you have to make the source code available to the services that use it.

For example you could modify WordPress (which is GPL licensed), put it on your server and let it serve pages without providing your modified source code to anyone.

If WordPress was AGPL licensed you would have to provide your modified source code to anyone using the system.

This also effects services that use libraries that are AGPL licensed (like newer versions of iText), but not services, that use other services.

The point is AGPL only adds that if you consume it over the network, you have the right to the source code. If you use it as a network service, for your webapp, your webapp is the consumer.

MongoDB has the same licensing model, and nobody sued Foursquare for the source code, so I guess this is legally tested ;)

rolfvandekrol2• 12 years ago

Hmm, if the community edition server is AGPL licensed, are they even allowed to have an enterprise edition that is not AGPL licensed? I suppose the enterprise edition is an altered version of the community edition, so can they be 'forced' to publish their changes?

infinite8s2• 12 years ago

This seems to be a common misconception about the interplay of copyright and GPL style licenses. Since they own the copyright, they can relicence it however they choose. The GPL and other open source licenses just give non-copyright holders additional rights beyond what copyright law provide (which for most works is nothing beyond a bit of fair-use). In that way the GPL is a clever hack of copyright, since it relies on the default of no-rights granted by copyright to enforce its terms.

rolfvandekrol2• 12 years ago

I get that part, but how does that work when other people also contribute changes for which they own the copyright and which are also AGPL licensed, but then to the Aerospike devs?

simi_• 12 years ago

Aerospike’s mission is to rain bullshit on the entire field of databases by offering an addictive proposition: a database literally ten times faster than existing NoSQL solutions, and one hundred times faster than existing SQL solutions.

Gotta love Disrupt to Bullshit: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disrupt-to-bullshi...

perlgeek• 12 years ago

Now I'm waiting for aphyr to test aerospike under cluster partition :-)

remon5• 12 years ago

Indeed.

remon5• 12 years ago

"A database literally ten times faster than existing NoSQL solutions, and one hundred times faster than existing SQL solution".

The odds of that claim being true and/or supported by benchmarks is somewhere well below the 1% mark. Why do companies keep making those sort of obviously questionable claims knowing the negative backlash that surely will follow. Boggles the mind really.

ZenoArrow12• 12 years ago

It's likely from the marketing team, not the engineering team. That doesn't mean the product itself cannot be solid.

remon5• 12 years ago

Nobody's arguing that the product isn't solid. Such claims are just a recipe for negative attention and are almost certainly not correct. And actually it'd be very odd for a marketing team to not verify their front page claims with the engineering team. This is a tech company afterall.

bbulkow2• 12 years ago

CTO, co-founder, initial coder here.

Aerospike really is a lot faster than Mongo and Cassandra. It's open source, and you can run whatever benchmarks you'd like yourself. It's about as fast a well-tuned multi-core sharded Redis system, except you don't have to write configure the sharding, and you can have a combination of RAM or Flash, different data in each, of course Flash is cheaper/slower but that's why we give you both.

You can run a single c3.8xlarge on amazon and see 1m tps, or 250K on a c3.2xlarge. We're doing a lot of benchmarks on EC2 and GCE because they're "reference platforms" that you'll all believe. More details in the coming weeks from us, or publish your own.

Just try it yourself; this isn't marketing.

Everyone I talk to coming from Cassandra is seeing a server reduction of 4x~5x, with higher levels of stability (overhead for peaks). I was at a conference late last week and the company I was with (adform's founder, Jakob) said they had a major Cassandra outage that week that cost them a lot of money, and Adform is a Cassandra contributor and knows what they're doing.

Same thing with Mongo shops. They do about 5x reduction and see much higher performance.

Technical points of why we're faster:

* Coded in C, multitheaded, with reference counting.

* Avoid malloc, but if you have to malloc, avoid the CLib memory allocator. We do a lot of slab allocation (a la memcache) and use JEmalloc for variable sized allocs.

* Use epoll directly and be careful about IO. Don't use mmap, which is 4x slower than read and write.

* Code directly to device, with your own data layout. Databases are a reliability layer, everything else is extra complexity. O_SYNC is better than fsync.

There's a lot of smaller tricks in the code, but it all adds up to speed, and I don't expect you to believe me. I've spent 25 years in silicon valley writing high performance software, and so has most of the team. We come from a strong background of embedded, settop box, cell phone programmers.

Let me tell you a short story. I brought my particular bag of tricks to a streaming video server company in the mid 90's. I produced an internal product that was 100x faster - that is, required 100x lower cost hardware than the company's existing product (133mhz Pentium instead of high end sun machines). The product got buried - because the sales guys couldn't make their commission checks.

I'm tired of that mentality.

Aerospike has been running in production at seriously high loads for years. I work with a lot of guys who say - "What else am I going to use?" For the use case where you want KVS, with decent API support (redis-like lists and UDFs), and a little analytics, and scale-out adding nodes under production load, it's the right choice.

If you're thinking of a Mongo KVS, Cassandra, Redis, you really need to look at Aerospike. Do yourself, and your startup, a favor.

( And, yes, the name is based on the Aerospike engine, but we were thinking more of the Trident II D5, which uses an Aerospike at the front, to essentially extend the aerodynamic length of the missile. The problem with sub-based missiles is they have to be short to fit in the sub, and a use of the aerospike was one of many techniques for making the US based deterrent accurate. We used the name Aerospike because there are a lot of small techniques that make an "unbelievable" difference - that's what engineering is, compared to theory. )

PM me directly if you're having trouble running benchmarks or anything.

regularfry• 12 years ago

Don't use mmap, which is 4x slower than read and write.

For what sorts of access patterns?

derekchiang• 12 years ago

Hi Brian, could you recommend some resources for learning to write high-performance code?

And also, would you care to explain why O_SYNC is better than fsync?

Thank you!

_benedict• 12 years ago

As a Cassandra Committer, I would really appreciate you updating your ycsb integration so we can corroborate your benchmarks, as I currently doubt their authenticity/honesty. It looks very much like you compared non-durable performance in Aerospike to durable performance in Cassandra.

It also appears from your documentation that you do not support any kind of safe active-active multi-dc mode, even in your paid-for offering (http://www.aerospike.com/docs/architecture/xdr.html), so even if faster than Cassandra, users should carefully read the fine print before deciding to use Aerospike, unless as the application grows in size and necessity (i.e. uninterruptibility in event of disaster) you want to find multi-dc is not actually viable for you.

NB: I'm unaware of any adform contributions to Cassandra, although a senior developer there has filed a few bug reports.

remon5• 12 years ago

100x faster != 100x cheaper. Anyway, I'm familiar with the codebase of both Cassandra and especially MongoDB and I just don't see room for a 100x performance improvement without sacrificing something. A bit of I/O tweaking certainly isn't going to result in such improvements nor will "Coding in C" which in and by itself does very little for performance at all.

That said, you are correct that the proof is in the pudding and everyone is free to do their own benchmarks. I'll do my own and see what's what.

mxpxrocks10• 12 years ago

hi! how does it compare to tokumx?

alexnewman3• 12 years ago

OK I can't find any tests. It also disturbs me when people "open source" projects without any real revision history.

Also is it true that https://github.com/aerospike/aerospike-server hasn't been updated?

ryanobjc• 12 years ago

A system without comprehensive tests is one that cannot be changed.

The big question is, do they have tests or not?

alexnewman3• 12 years ago

AFAIK basically not. Check my above comment. Those they have seem to be cryptic and few and far between.

cstivers1978• 12 years ago

Aerospike maintains a comprehensive set of tests for the server. Every commit goes through functional and regression tests. Each release goes through a gauntlet of performance and clustering tests. The test system is a standalone system from the database, and is integrated with our CI system. Unfortunately, we have not been able to publish our test system, yet.

alexnewman3• 12 years ago

Common atleast has some tests posix4es-MacBook-Air-3:aerospike-common posix4e$ cloc src/main/ - 6603 posix4es-MacBook-Air-3:aerospike-common posix4e$ cloc src/test/ - 1247

I worry about test coverage stats like that

Not to mention if you look at the tests

/ * TEST CASES /

TEST( msgpack_roundtrip_integer1, "roundtrip: 123" ) { as_integer i1; as_integer_init(&i1, 123);

        as_integer i2;
        as_integer_init(&i2, 456);

        as_val * v2 = roundtrip((as_val *) &i1);

        assert_val_eq(v2, &i1);

        as_integer_destroy(&i1);
        as_val_destroy(v2);

}
Not exactly terse and readable

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qmaxquique• 12 years ago

You can try Aerospike in a Terminal.com container. I've created a snapshot with a simple CRUD example at https://terminal.com/tiny/yEITIwNyLT

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Aerospike goes Open Source

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