I currently work for a company that uses Aerospike quite heavily. In the past couple weeks, we have begun to notice data inconsistencies in our counters. We are seeing fluctuations in the data, despite having no decrement operations.<p>We have the enterprise edition of Aerospike, allowing us to be in constant contact with their support team and developers. A couple weeks later, and we still have no idea why this is happening. When dealing with monetary values, these fluctuations are very bad for us. Needless to say, we have begun migrating away from Aerospike.
The rotated A in the Aerospike logo reminds me of a system that's fallen over, and now you can't unsee it:<p><a href="http://www.aerospike.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.aerospike.com/</a>
What is the 3 color chart that I've seen posted in several of these articles? I get that it breaks down the different CAP combinations with the things that it allows/implies. But is there a good breakdown of all the terms and what they mean?
I've used Aerospike at scale (approx 1MM tx per second) in private network, and smaller loads in cloud. I have always found it to be fast, reliable and extremely easy to operate (upgrade, modify cluster members, etc) w/o any downtime or interruption. It is a critical tool in my toolbox. I also have found their support and engineering team to be excellent.<p>I admire the work that Aphyr does - though at the end of the day, I need to build systems that work for the problem I'm trying to solve (and I have to choose from real things that are available).<p>Aerospike isn't the solution to every storage problem, and if you are choosing technology based on marketing material, you're probably going to be disappointed.<p>These technologies in general are trying to address <i>really hard problems</i> and design and architecture is the art of balancing tradeoffs. Nothing is going to be perfect. Yet.
I was wondering what is going on, with the titles of this form appearing on HN and now browsing the blog, it appears that the author is the fan of the "Call me maybe" titled posts (a lot of them there, and then also here!). From what I understand, this phrase, as used in the titles by him, seem to mean to him something like the "review of" something or the "comment on" something. For what it's worth.
The minimum useful licensing is in the tens of thousands of dollars. For the SLA they offer, it makes sense. Many well known Ad Serving companies utilize Aerospike (at a fraction of the cost of their previous solutions). It's very impressive result, per machine, from an operational standpoint.
Is there any reason he's never tried to analyze a "classic" RDBMS like Oracle or SQL Server? I have to imagine they'd clobber a lot of this hipster technology.
We use Aerospike heavily. It works just fine.<p>I'm constantly surprised by the general tone of comments on posts like these as if it's some crazy revelation that this software still obeys the fundamental laws of distributed systems.<p>There is no perfect database out there, all of them will fail with network partitions. Aerospike was designed to work in clusters that are very close together, often the same rack. It has much tighter timings and tolerances in exchange for providing much higher performance in certain situations and definitely has one of the best SSD focused storage systems I've come across.<p>If you don't have a high performance network interconnect between nodes, then there will be more issues with Aerospike since it relies on that more than some other system that use Paxos for all writes (like aphyr mentions). We run several TB's of data accessed at 100k+ TPS including very fine grained counters and everything works. And yes, we run on the cloud in AWS and SoftLayer and have yet to have major problems with the proper network setup.<p>Btw, there is a comment below from the current CTO of AppNexus, one of the companies that pioneered real-time bidding for digital ads and runs several million auctions per second on one of the biggest ad exchanges available. They were the first customer for Aerospike and from everything I've learned from their team, it works really well for them, and they definitely are not happy to just "lose" data however insignificant it might seem. Volume changes everything and even a fraction of a percent will add up. We trust Aerospike because it's been hardened by lots of much much larger companies with very high production usage, the key is being aware of all the technical requirements and the environment you're deploying in.<p>I think the real major issue here that people seem upset with are the general claims and marketing information. I can't speak to all that and there are definitely some things like 100% uptime which do seem overly confident, but this is true of every single technology vendor out there unfortunately. I'm not saying Aerospike is any better or worse as a company but marketing material only goes so far and it would surprise me if further research wasn't done for any mission critical system.