India’s Ecommerce Powerhouse Snapdeal Sees Immediate Payoff with Aerospike

Snapdeal wanted a technology solution that could affordably scale as the business expanded. It required a high-throughput, low-latency system that could scale from 2 million to 150 million records, from 10,000 to 30,000 reads per second, and from 30 to 500 writes per second. Snapdeal also sought a technology solution that could affordably scale as the business expanded and did not want to use an expensive clustered relational database management system (RDBMS). For Snapdeal, the Aerospike in-memory NoSQL database provided several advantages over others. Most of the systems reviewed by Snapdeal engineers failed to meet at least one of the criteria: The existing MongoDB solution lacked predictable response times under high write loads, sharding was complex, and hardware requirements for scaling were cost prohibitive. Clustered RDBMS databases and the Terracotta BigMemory Max caching technology were too expensive. Redis did not have a server-side distribution mechanism at that point of time. Amazon Memcache and Amazon DynamoDB did not deliver predictable low latency. Couchbase replicas could only be used as backup copies, not to distribute load. Moreover, it required twice the number of servers as Aerospike for the same throughput. Aerospike performed with predictable low latency with 95-99% of transactions completing within 10 milliseconds—essential for enabling a responsive customer experience. Second, Aerospike had the highest throughput. Third, Aerospike delivered the highest price/performance—offering the lowest cost solution in terms of both hardware requirements and ease of operations.