Reading Group Special Session: Scalability and Fault Tolerance in YDB

YDB is an open-source Distributed SQL Database. YDB is used as an OLTP Database for mission-critical user-facing applications. It provides strong consistency and serializable transaction isolation for the end user. One of the main characteristics of YDB is scalability to very large clusters together with multitenancy, i.e. ability to provide an isolated user environment for users in a single cluster. In this talk, we will cover two layers of YDB – Tablet and BlobStorage layers that together provide fault tolerance, scalability, and user isolation.

Tablet is a very lightweight component that implements distributed consensus. It is a building block for user data storage, schema manager, tablet manager, system views, and many other components. A single YDB cluster is known to have more than a million tablets, a single YDB node can serve up to 10K tablets. Tablet implements distributed consensus protocol over a shared log provided by the BlobStorage layer.

The BlobStorage layer is a fault-tolerant key-value append-only database. It implements a specific API for logging, blobs reading and writing, garbage collection, and quorum management. We believe that the protocol between Tablet and BlobStorage is quite simple and understandable by listeners compared to Paxos or Raft. We also illustrate the flexibility of YDB in real-life use cases like migrating some parts of the cluster from one availability zone to another without a maintenance window or storing some data blobs on fast media like SSD and another blob on HDD.

Speaker: Andrey is the head of the YDB project (https://ydb.tech). He works in Yandex as a Head of Department. He also has a long story in Yandex as a member of the Web Crawler Team, a member of the Infrastructure team, one of the creators of Yandex Cloud, and now the part of CloudIL Team. Andrey holds a Ph.D. from Moscow State University.

When: Wednesday, August 10th at 2:00 pm EST (6 pm UTC)

Where: Zoom