Ask Me Anything with Avi Kivity

The Ask Me Anything (AMA) session with Avi Kivity, ScyllaDB's CTO, covered various technical aspects and future directions of ScyllaDB, an open-source database. Avi discussed the potential programming languages for ScyllaDB, expressing a preference for Rust over JavaScript and Go due to its precise control and lack of a garbage collector. He highlighted the current limitations in supporting plugins, plans for extending ScyllaDB to cloud platforms like Azure and GCP, and the approach to implementing DynamoDB-compatible transactions. The dynamic memory allocation method was favored over object pooling due to its adaptability to irregular workloads. Avi also touched upon the use of C++20 for its coroutine feature, compared ScyllaDB to databases like Aerospike and MongoDB in terms of scalability and performance, and discussed the potential of running ScyllaDB on Arm architectures, specifically Amazon's Graviton2, contingent on the availability of fast NVMe storage. Debugging strategies were also detailed, emphasizing tracing and metrics over heavy reliance on logs to troubleshoot field issues.