CPU core counts continue to grow, along with the raw speed of networking and storage devices available on a modern system. Software design approaches that were valid and safe even a few years ago are no longer sustainable. On new hardware, the performance of standard workloads depends more on locking and coordination across cores than on performance of an individual core.
The team behind the KVM hypervisor and the OSv unikernel is moving up the stack. The Seastar platform enables extreme high-throughput, low-latency applications on OSv or Linux, and can make existing real-world workloads run completely asynchronously.
Seastar uses shared-nothing data structures that eliminate costly locking between CPUs, and a dedicated user-space TCP implementation that runs on DPDK. These radical changes in the server design translate into 5X-10x performance gain while preserving all of the Cassandra goodies.
Avi Kivity - Cloudius Systems Ltd
Avi Kivity, CTO of Cloudius Systems, is known mostly for starting the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) project, the hypervisor underlying many production clouds. He has worked for Qumranet and Red Hat as KVM maintainer until December 2012. Avi is now CTO of Cloudius Systems, a company that seeks to bring the same kind of innovation to the public cloud space.
