Item: Aerospike
Rating: 6
Author: Anson Abraham

Overall Satisfaction with Aerospike Database

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Fastest KV lookup we ever did, by using Aerospike. Compared it to other KV lookups such as Redis, MemcacheD and Genie.
The Aerospike database has become core to the company product itself. It essentially reduced lookups by 30% compared to Redis and memcacheD. The core product of the company is adserving and was used as well for fraudulent clicks, and such.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Scales really quickly and easily. Can deploy a new cluster or add to a cluster fairly quick.
MGMT UI is easy to use. Utilizing cli, makes it easy to "autoscale" for us.
The sharding removes any need to overlook to make sure if balanced correctly.
HA is dead simple, that almost little to no need figure out how to do it.

Cons

Load balancing per network segments.
Reduction in price.
Cross datacenter replication usage isn't so straightforward. Sometimes cross dc replication can have issues of bad data..

Return on Investment

Less mgmt headaches, prompting time to focus on other issues.
HA, required little handholding. And minimization of downtime.
Cross region replication is not great, which sometimes requires data integrity checks on your end.

Alternatives Considered

Redis, MongoDB and Cassandra

Compared to the above for K/V lookups and writes, it is faster. However, less than 1 MB, i'd use Redis, if you're willing to write package for HA in Redis. However HA between Redis and aerospike, aerospike is top notch. K/V lookups were 20-30% faster than Redis, 50% faster than Mongo, and 45% faster than Cassandra. But again, aerospike is really expensive.

Other Software Used

Cassandra, Hadoop, Apache Spark

Likelihood to Renew

If money isn't an issue, and you're not on the cloud, then I'd go with Aerospike. If you're the cloud ie, aws or azure, then i'd stick with dynamoDB or Cosmos then. Aerospike is definitely not something you want to put into the cloud. It doesn't work well w/ cross regions. If cross DC, you'll have to write some stuff for data integrity checks.

Likelihood to Recommend

Compared to redis and memcacheD, high availibity is best from Aerospike. Load balancing is also well done through Aerospike. If you're doing K/V lookups data exceeds more than 1MB, then Aerospike definitely fits the bill. However, it is not best as a document store. It is really atrocious in that nature. If anything look @ Mongo or something else then.

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Aerospike review