From No Cache to Membase: The Knot

Jason Sirota is telling the story of how The Knot (a media company) went from no cache to Membase passing through memcached and Gear6.

In talking to Membase and through our own research, we found that Membase solved all of our original problems, plus our new problems with Gear6.

1. Membase provides a rich set of both GUI and programmatic tools to manage and monitor the cache.

2. Membase not only runs on multiple physical nodes but balances keys across those nodes using the vBuckets

3. Membase runs on Windows and can handle quite a bit more capacity (evidenced by Zynga) than we could possibly use.

4. Membase uses both HA replication and distributed nodes for different solutions, in our case, it easily supports the 5 node-configuration

5. Membase provides Buckets that can be configured by Port to allow different teams to have a set amount of space

6. Hardware can be added both horizontally and vertically to a Membase cluster. However, one limitation is that all nodes have to run the same cache limit so you do need to think carefully about your node size

7. No company is immune to going under but, in addition to their strong financial state, the risk for Membase is mitigated by two factors:

If you want the simplified version:

• a typical story where to maintain the quality of the service, caching had to used
• a typical story where with scale came also the need for better administration and monitoring tool
• a typical story where op costs should be kept as much under control and even reduced if possible

What made Membase the winning solution for The Knot?

Some would say the feature set, which I’ll probably agree — pointing out though that such features can be found in other NoSQL databases too.

I’d say it’s Membase usage of a well-established protocol. That didn’t require The Knot to completely rewrite the whole persistence layer. Even if Membase would not have had all required features, using the memcached protocol made it the easiest solution to try out as no application changes were needed.

Original title and link: From No Cache to Membase: The Knot (NoSQL databases © myNoSQL)

via: http://jasonsirota.com/the-knot-cache-architecture-part-i-choosing-a?c=1