The demo intentionally starts with SIGKILL to show crash recovery first.
For benchmarks: I used real network (not loopback) and sync-majority writes in a 3-node Raft cluster.
Happy to answer questions about tradeoffs vs Kafka / Redis Streams and what’s still missing.
Thank you for sharing, this looks really cool. The simplicity of setting this up and operating it reminds me a lot of nsq which received a lot less publicity than it should have.
That’s a great comparison nsq is a project I have a lot of respect for.
I think there’s a similar philosophy around simplicity and operator experience.
Where Ayder diverges is in durability and recovery semantics nsq intentionally
trades some of that off to stay lightweight.
The goal here is to keep the “easy to run” feeling, but with stronger guarantees
around crash recovery and replication.
Yes I’ve read through TigerBeetle’s VSR design and their rationale for not using Raft.
VSR makes a lot of sense for their problem space: fixed schema, deterministic state machine,
and a very tight control over replication + execution order.
Ayder has a different set of constraints:
- append-only logs with streaming semantics
- dynamic topics / partitions
- external clients producing arbitrary payloads over HTTP
Raft here is a pragmatic choice: it’s well understood, easier to reason about for operators,
and fits the “easy to try, easy to operate” goal of the system.
That said, I think VSR is a great example of what’s possible when you fully own the problem
and can specialize aggressively. Definitely a project I’ve learned from.
Thank you for sharing this with us.
For benchmarks: I used real network (not loopback) and sync-majority writes in a 3-node Raft cluster. Happy to answer questions about tradeoffs vs Kafka / Redis Streams and what’s still missing.
I think there’s a similar philosophy around simplicity and operator experience. Where Ayder diverges is in durability and recovery semantics nsq intentionally trades some of that off to stay lightweight.
The goal here is to keep the “easy to run” feeling, but with stronger guarantees around crash recovery and replication.
VSR makes a lot of sense for their problem space: fixed schema, deterministic state machine, and a very tight control over replication + execution order.
Ayder has a different set of constraints: - append-only logs with streaming semantics - dynamic topics / partitions - external clients producing arbitrary payloads over HTTP
Raft here is a pragmatic choice: it’s well understood, easier to reason about for operators, and fits the “easy to try, easy to operate” goal of the system.
That said, I think VSR is a great example of what’s possible when you fully own the problem and can specialize aggressively. Definitely a project I’ve learned from.