- Durability & Availability: opendata systems can be deployed in production with a single replica and still maintain durability and high write availability.
- Failover & Scaling: worker nodes are stateless and only use local disks for caching, making failovers and horizontal scaling trivial.
- Backups & Branches: all data is stored immutably, so backups and branches are as easy as marking data immune to garbage collection.
- Cost to Serve: object storage is not only less expensive than replicated disks, it also provides free cross-zone data transfer for ingestion and replication.
Concepts
Introduction
OpenData is a collection of operationaly simple, open source databases that
share a unified storage foundation on object storage.
Database software is often available for free as open source, but the real cost
comes from the operational expertise required to keep them running. Operators
must understand and configure behavior for replication, failover, backup,
capacity planning, and disaster recovery. These concerns multiply with every
additional database system since each ship with their own implementations.
Is there a better way? We believe that the general avaialbility of Object
Storage is the escape hatch. Services like S3 provide durability, replication,
and availability at commodity prices with no operational overhead. When you
push replication and durability down to the storage layer, the database itself
becomes dramatically simpler. Entire categories of complexity disappear: