Low-latency Key-Value Store for SSD

Question

We are working on a SSD-backed key-value solution with the following properties:

• Throughput: 10000 TPS; 50/50 puts/gets;
• Latency: 1ms average, 99.9th pe

Answer 1

Aerospike is a newer key/value (row) store that can run completely off of SSDs with < 1ms latency for read/write and very high TPS (reaching into millions).

SSDs have great random read access but the key to reducing variance on writes is using sequential IO (this is similar to regular hard disks). It also greatly reduces wear leveling and fade that can occur with lots of writes on SSDs.

If you're building your own key-value system, use a log-structured approach (like Aerospike) so that writes are in bulk and appended/written in large chunks. An in-memory index can maintain the correct data locations for the values while a background process cleans stale/deleted data from disk and defrags files.