We crossed the three year mark of developing YugabyteDB in February of 2019. It has been a thrilling journey thus far, but not without its fair share of technical challenges. There were times when we had to go back to the drawing board and even sift through academic research to find a better solution than what we had at hand. In this post we’ll outline some of the hardest architectural issues we have had to address in our journey of building an open source, cloud native, high-performance distributed SQL database. Look for subsequent posts that will dive-deep into each respective issue.
One decision we made early on was to find a database we could use as inspiration for YugabyteDB’s architecture. We looked closely at two systems, Amazon Aurora and Google Spanner.
Amazon Aurora is a SQL database that offers high availability. It has drop-in compatibility with popular RDBMS databases like MySQL and PostgreSQL, making it very easy to get started with and can run a wide variety of applications. Amazon Aurora is also one of the fastest growing services in the history of AWS.