Aerospike Achieves One Million Writes Per Second on Google Compute Engine with Just 50 Nodes

Aerospike, an open-source, flash-optimized, in-memory NoSQL database, was looking to push the boundaries of Google's speed on Google Compute Engine. The challenge was to meet high throughput, consistently low latency, and real-time processing, which are characteristic of future cloud applications. The team at Aerospike was inspired by Ivan Santa Maria Filho, Performance Engineering Lead at Google, who demonstrated 1 Million Writes Per Second with Cassandra on Google Compute Engine. The goal was to benchmark Aerospike's product performance on Google Compute Engine and see if it could scale with consistently low latency, require smaller clusters, and be simpler to operate.

Aerospike is used as a front edge operational database for a variety of purposes: a session or user context store for real-time bidding, personalization, fraud detection, and real-time analytics. These applications must read and write billions of keys and terabytes, from click-streams to sensor data. Data in Aerospike is replicated synchronously in-memory to ensure immediate consistency and written to disk asynchronously. The combined Aerospike-Google Cloud Platform solution could fuel an entirely new category of applications that must process data in real-time and at scale from the very start, enabling a new class of startups with business models that were not viable economically previously.