FoundationDB: A Distributed Unbundled Transactional Key Value Store (2021)

FoundationDB is a distributed transactional key value store created in 2009 wich guarantee ACID transactions at scale.

This is paper published by the FoundationDB team summarising there approach to building a distributed database 10 years after building it. There is a lot of interesting things inside it but here are my main takeaway:

• They built the simulation and testing framework before starting to build the actual database. This really highlights the importance of extensive testing capabilities if you want to achieve consistency and robustness in complex systems. I find the idea of a simulation to continuously test and find bug in a system trully amazing and I hope I will have the chance to do something similar one day.
• FoundationDB offers a minimal and carefully chosen feature set and instead realy on a layered architecture to enable other developer to implement there own feature and data-model. This approch has seen a lot of success as FoundationDB has been used as a literal foundation for other paradigm of distributed databases: semi-relational databases, document and object stores, graph databases and more.
• I am way over my head with the internals of the transaction system.