Somewhat related to my two recent blog posts about the OpenStack design tenets, I’ve spent a couple of days hacking on BasicDB.
BasicDB is a new project which aims to be feature and API compatible with AWS SimpleDB. I wouldn’t mind at all for it to become an OpenStack project, but I have a hard time finding the motivation to come up with a OpenStacky API when there’s already a perfectly functional one that happens to match AWS SimpleDB. If someone wants to contribute that, that’d be great.
Anyway, it seems I need to clarify a few things with regards to BasicDB and how it relates to Trove.
If you’re familiar with AWS’s services (which you should be… They’re awesome), Trove is equivalent to RDS. It’s a service that simplifies the provisioning and management of a relational data store, typically MySQL (in AWS’s case, it can be MySQL, MS SQL Server or Oracle). So each user can utilize Trove to spin up and manage their own MySQL (or whatever) server instance.
BasicDB, on the other hand, is equivalent to SimpleDB. It exposes a basic API that lets you store data and issue queries for said data. Every user interacts with the same instance of BasicDB and it’s up to the cloud provider to set up and maintain a decent backend store for it. At the moment, there are three: A fake one (stores everything in dicts and sets), a filesystem based one (which might not be an entirely horrible solution if you have cephfs or GlusterFS backing said filesystem) or a Riak based one. The Riak based one is still somewhat naïve in that it doesn’t handle sibling reconciliation *at all* yet. More are likely to come, since they’re pretty simple to add.