After considering several options, Rakuten chose Aerospike as its core database for its ability to handle the company’s massive data volumes with high performance and low latency at infinite scale as loads increase and data volumes grow. Rakuten especially values Aerospike’s flash storage (SSD) because it enables enormous vertical scale-up at a much lower total cost of ownership (TCO) than pure RAM.
“With Aerospike, we’ve so far been able to linearly scale to 2TB with no loss of performance. And its performance is consistent and highly available regardless of how many millions of users we serve or how much data we’re processing at any given time – Aerospike has never crashed,” said Daiji Ito, a Manager from Delivery Group, Rakuten Asia Pte. Ltd.
Aerospike is different from other NoSQL databases. Even in strong consistency mode, it provides high-speed delivery to the edge thanks to its Hybrid Memory Architecture, where the index is purely in-memory and data is stored only on SSD and read directly from the disk. This architecture allows Aerospike to support high-speed lookup with indexes in memory and data in SSD without causing excessive CPU load.
Aerospike’s User Profile Store offers the lowest latency with the highest performance from gigabytes to petabytes with hundreds to hundreds of millions of concurrent users, industry-leading five-nines of uptime, and up to 80% less server or cloud infrastructure.
Using Aerospike has also made operational tasks easier for the Rakuten team. When problems happen like a node goes down or a server reboots, Aerospike automatically resolves it. And if a server goes down or is removed from a cluster, it doesn’t compromise the entire cluster. The team can quickly bring it back whenever it’s ready.
“We have only one or two members on our DevOps team, but they can easily sync up a multi-site cluster. Our developers can create a cluster and remove nodes with a few simple commands,” said Ito.