MemoryDB: Speed, Durability, and Composition. - Marc's Blog

submited by

Style Pass

2024-04-25 16:30:06

Earlier this week, my colleagues Yacine Taleb, Kevin McGehee, Nan Yan, Shawn Wang, Stefan Mueller, and Allen Samuels published Amazon MemoryDB: A fast and durable memory-first cloud database1. I’m excited about this paper, both because its a very cool system, and because it gives us an opportunity to talk about the power of composition in distributed systems, and about the power of distributed systems in general.

Amazon MemoryDB for Redis is a durable database with microsecond reads, low single-digit millisecond writes, scalability, and enterprise security. MemoryDB delivers 99.99% availability and near instantaneous recovery without any data loss.

We describe how, using this architecture, we are able to remain fully compatible with Redis, while providing single-digit millisecond write and microsecond-scale read latencies, strong consistency, and high availability.

This is remarkable: MemoryDB keeps compatibility with an existing in-memory data store, adds multi-AZ (multi-datacenter) durability, adds high availability, and adds strong consistency on failover, while still improving read performance and with fairly little cost to write performance.