Last time I looked at Aerospike, I read that it was designed for very low-latency network links, and was apparently not particularly suitable for use in the cloud (where latencies is typically much spikier than in within a single rack you control). Anyone using it in production on Google Cloud or AWS, for example?
According to Aerospike's internal numbers, 40% of our paying users are on Amazon. It certainly does work in that environment, provides huge benefits compared to DynamoDB. You just have to change a couple of tuning parameters, and build your data architecture correctly ( don't build a single cluster over two AZ ).
Aerospike was the last piece of software that impressed me with both benchmark scores and architecture being so well done that I can't find any comparison in the distributed db class.
I really want to use it in production, but what scares me is its association with Redhat. The tastiest cookie in the jar - cross dc replication is already paywalled. I'm afraid it will further go through the route of becoming begware, premiumware, or "consultanthiringware" that software out of Redhat's shop tend to become over the time.
Honest question - why should you be entitled to a free (as in beer) high-quality database that provides open-source cross-datacenter replication? Typically that is a feature only needed/used by large enterprises with sizable IT budgets. Considering the product is complex to develop, why should someone do it for no compensation?
Q: why should we be entitled to a posix-compliant operating system that is free? (or anything at all, really?)
A: I dont feel entitled, I just wanted to know, if it exists, I might want to use it.
Is it possible that the feature is only used by enterprises because no one else can afford it? Why would anyone contribute to an open source project without compensation?
I can imagine that anyone using cheap VPS hosting at multiple locations for better reliability/accessibility/latency could have use for cross-datacenter replication.
Scylladb and Couchbase are both codebases run by companies that have free versions, just like Aerospike. If you don't like our model, you shouldn't like their model.
Look, I'm biased because I'm the CTO of Aerospike, but we do give a free and unlimited open source edition, and our enterprise customers save a _TON_ of money compared to Cassandra, because we're not bottlenecked on CPU, and we use less power-hungry DRAM and more NAND Flash. In several recent customers, we save them literally a million dollars a year.
PayPal has a ton of Aerospike in production now, and they're very happy about it.
Thus I can claim we are simply better, and we are doing fundamental systems engineering to make it so. If you're a C and systems engineer who wants to solve real high performance problems and is sick of "just make it scale don't make it efficient", our offices are in Mt View and we're always hiring, drop me a line...
For the record, Aerospike has no association with RedHat.
RedHat took someone else's work ( Linus and the Linux community ) and commercialized it. They provide a useful service, but the RedHat money may or may not go to the developers who make Linux great ( some necessary elements, like, say, OpenSSL, are outside the Linux umbrella )
At Aerospike, you are supporting the people who do the work. Not like RedHat at all.
In a gist, very good pick if it's acceptable to lose writes in some circumstances.