jackprice / globalflow

A very experimental Redis-compatible globally distributed KV store written in Go.

GlobalFlow

A very experimental Redis-compatible globally distributed KV store written in Go.

It's intended for low latency reads and high availability with eventual consistency.

Objectives

• To be simple to deploy and use - the system will hide all the complexity
• No cluster management - the system will automatically discover and manage the cluster
• To be simple to reason about
• Low latency for reads
• High availability
• Be Redis-compatible

Assumptions

• Network communication is cheap and easy
• Clocks are synchronised (this is a pretty safe assumption)

Communication

For ease of deployment across heterogeneous networks, GlobalFlow uses HTTP for inter-region communication. Low-latency intra-region communication is over TCP and UDP.

Globalflow is architected as a ring of rings. Each zone is a ring of nodes. Communication consistently flows in one direction.

Reliability

GlobalFlows reliability model is probabilistic rather than deterministic. When you write a value to the store, it is probably persisted. When you read a value from the store, you will probably get the latest value.

Redis compatibility

The following Redis commands are supported:

• GET
• SET
• DEL
• LPUSH