FoundationDB's Engineering Challenges: Balancing Performance, Scalability, and Reliability

FoundationDB began with ambitious goals for both high performance per node and scalability.

We knew that to achieve these goals we would face serious engineering challenges while developing the FoundationDB core.

We'd need to implement efficient asynchronous communicating processes of the sort supported by Erlang or the Async library in .NET, but we'd also need the raw speed and I/O efficiency of C++.

Finally, we'd need to perform extensive simulation to engineer for reliability and fault tolerance on large clusters.