November 2022 Summaries

Yaniv Kaul, newly appointed VP of Research and Development at ScyllaDB, brings extensive experience from his previous role as Senior Director of Engineering at Red Hat, where he led various engineering groups, including Cloud Infrastructure. Kaul's interest in distributed systems, coupled with his fascination for core technology areas like performance and scale, aligns with ScyllaDB's focus on cloud developments and technical achievements. At a recent ScyllaDB R&D Summit in Tbilisi, Kaul appreciated the open, unconference-like atmosphere that encouraged discussion over decision-making. He is excited about ScyllaDB's cloud journey, particularly the integration with Kubernetes, and sees both challenges and opportunities in this path. Kaul emphasizes the importance of community feedback and contributions, especially in enhancing ScyllaDB’s user interface and testing capabilities, while highlighting the underutilized potential of ScyllaDB’s Monitoring Stack. In his spare time, Kaul enjoys travel and photography, particularly capturing images of bees, reflecting his penchant for tackling complex challenges.

ScyllaDB University Live is set to return with a focus on providing new content for both beginners and advanced users interested in NoSQL and ScyllaDB's latest capabilities. The event will feature a notable roundtable discussion with key figures such as Avi Kivity, Dor Laor, and Tzach Livyatan, who will address various aspects of ScyllaDB, including its creation, product roadmap, deployment options, and strategies for efficient cluster architecture. A highlight of the event is the implementation of the Raft consensus algorithm in ScyllaDB to ensure consistent schema updates and topology changes, enhancing the database's reliability and performance. The sessions will cover a range of topics, from basic ScyllaDB operations to advanced features and troubleshooting, alongside a comparison of ScyllaDB with other databases like Redis and Cassandra. Participants will also have opportunities to engage in interactive sessions, hands-on labs, and earn completion certificates.

ScyllaDB has launched a Community Forum to support its rapidly growing user base, offering a platform for users to connect, share experiences, and troubleshoot issues related to ScyllaDB, a fast NoSQL database. The forum is designed for users to access frequently asked questions, engage in discussions about new features and integration options, and share knowledge within the community. It serves as an additional resource, complementing existing platforms like ScyllaDB-User Slack, but is not intended for real-time chat or enterprise support. The forum encourages participation through various categories, including a knowledge base, community interactions, university training, and blog discussions, with features like advanced search, notifications, and badges to enhance user engagement.

The ScyllaDB Internal R&D Summit, held in late October in Tbilisi, Georgia, brought together over 50 developers from various countries to foster knowledge sharing and team bonding within the company, which operates on a remote-first model. This bi-annual event featured technical sessions on topics such as user-visible features, ScyllaDB Cloud's future, and distributed transactions in NoSQL, allowing participants to engage in lively discussions and Q&A sessions. Beyond the technical realm, attendees enjoyed team-building activities like hiking in the Caucasus Mountains, exploring Georgian cuisine and winemaking, and participating in cultural tours, all of which strengthened the sense of unity and shared purpose among the ScyllaDB team. The summit underscored the importance of in-person interactions, which had been missed during the COVID-19 pandemic, and highlighted ScyllaDB's commitment to maintaining a strong company culture and effective communication.

ScyllaDB University LIVE is a free virtual event scheduled for December 1, 2022, featuring instructor-led training sessions conducted by top ScyllaDB engineers and experts. The event offers two parallel tracks—ScyllaDB Essentials and Advanced Topics—allowing participants to switch between sessions or attend individually. The Essentials track provides foundational insights into ScyllaDB, including data modeling and setting up clusters, while the Advanced Topics track focuses on enhancing performance through advanced features like materialized views and secondary indexes. The event includes live sessions only, with no on-demand alternatives, and concludes with an expert panel discussion and opportunities for quizzes and hands-on labs. Participants are encouraged to complete the ScyllaDB Essentials course beforehand to maximize their learning experience.

ShareChat, India's leading social media platform, faced challenges in achieving microsecond P99 latency for 1.2 million operations per second to support 180 million monthly active users, necessitating a modernization of their NoSQL database. Geetish Nayak, Staff Engineer/Architect at ShareChat, spearheaded a migration from their existing database to ScyllaDB, resulting in a 3-5x performance improvement and a 50-80% reduction in costs. The transition involved migrating 80TB of data and 40 services with zero downtime while adopting best practices such as ScyllaDB's shard-per-core architecture, which enhanced performance and reduced the need for additional caching solutions like Redis. The migration included deploying ScyllaDB across core use cases such as chat applications, real-time notifications, and data science feature stores. ShareChat's architecture relies on Apache Kafka for aggregating user interactions, which are then written to ScyllaDB using atomic counters to handle high-volume data efficiently.

GumGum, an AdTech company, has significantly reduced its operational overhead by integrating ScyllaDB, a managed database service, into its infrastructure to enhance its proprietary machine-learning platform, Verity. This shift allowed the company to transition from a resource-intensive, self-managed Cassandra database on Amazon Web Services to ScyllaDB, which efficiently manages ad targeting by tracking ad exposure across different regions to prevent over-serving. The switch to ScyllaDB, which is API-compatible with Apache Cassandra, addressed GumGum's challenges in ensuring that consumers do not repeatedly see the same ads, regardless of their global location. ScyllaDB's resilience, achieved through geographically distributed replica databases, helped GumGum maintain consistent service and reduce complexity, allowing the company to focus on its core business and handle a significant increase in ad volume with ease. The collaboration between ScyllaDB and GumGum also involved overcoming initial integration challenges, leading to the development of an admission control mechanism to manage connection storms effectively, ultimately leading to a streamlined and efficient ad-serving process.