Avi Kivity and Dor Laor AMA: “Tablets” replication, all things async, caching, object storage & more

ScyllaDB recently hosted a virtual event featuring an "Ask Me Anything" session with its co-founders, Dor Laor and Avi Kivity, where they discussed several advancements and features of ScyllaDB, including the new tablets replication algorithm, async shard-per-core architecture, and caching strategies. They highlighted the efficiency of tablets over Vnodes in scaling operations, as tablets allow for incremental capacity and quicker node integration, reducing the all-or-nothing scaling issue. ScyllaDB's thread-per-core architecture and emphasis on asynchronous operations enable high concurrency and performance, with innovations like automatic tuning and workload prioritization enhancing its adaptability. The database's integrated caching system, which exploits server memory effectively, was contrasted with external caching solutions, offering advantages in performance and cost-effectiveness. With the introduction of S3 support, ScyllaDB aims to optimize storage costs while dealing with the trade-off of higher latency, proposing a tiered storage approach. The discussion also touched on the improvements ScyllaDB offers over Apache Cassandra, such as the absence of JVM, enhanced caching algorithms, and better observability, positioning ScyllaDB as a performant and user-friendly database solution.