How Development
Teams Cut Costs
with ScyllaDB
Tzach Livyatan, VP Product at ScyllaDB

Poll
Where are you in your NoSQL adoption?

Tzach Livyatan
+ ScyllaDB, VP Product
+ Tzach has a 20 year career in development, system
engineering and product management.
+ He has worked in the Telecom domain, focusing on
carrier grade systems, signalling, policy and
charging applications for Oracle and others.
3

Agenda
■ Introduction to ScyllaDB
■ Why is ScyllaDB Less Expensive?
■ How is ScyllaDB Less Expensive?
■ Using ScyllaDB Workload Prioritization to
Reduce Costs
■ Summary

+ NoSQL, OLTP Distributed NoSQL Database
+ Founded by designers of KVM Hypervisor: Avi Kivity
and Dor Laor
+ Resolves challenges of legacy NoSQL databases
+ >5x higher throughput
+ >20x lower latency
+ >75% TCO savings
+ DBaaS/Cloud, Enterprise and Open Source solutions
+ Compatible with Apache Cassandra and Amazon
DynamoDB
The Database Built for Gamechangers
5
“ScyllaDB stands apart...It’s the rare product
that exceeds my expectations.”
– Martin Heller, InfoWorld contributing editor and reviewer
“For 99.9% of applications, ScyllaDB delivers all the
power a customer will ever need, on workloads that other
databases can’t touch – and at a fraction of the cost of
an in-memory solution.”
– Adrian Bridgewater, Forbes senior contributor

6
+400 Gamechangers Leverage ScyllaDB
Seamless experiences
across content + devices
Fast computation of flight
pricing
Corporate fleet
management
Real-time analytics 2,000,000 SKU -commerce
management
Video recommendation
management
Threat intelligence service
using JanusGraph
Real time fraud detection
across 6M transactions/day
Uber scale, mission critical
chat & messaging app
Network security threat
detection
Power ~50M X1 DVRs with
billions of reqs/day
Precision healthcare via
Edison AI
Inventory hub for retail
operations
Property listings and
updates
Unified ML feature store
across the business
Cryptocurrency exchange
app
Geography-based
recommendations
Global operations- Avon,
Body Shop + more
Predictable performance for
on sale surges
GPS-based exercise
tracking
Serving dynamic live
streams at scale
Powering India's top
social media platform
Personalized
advertising to players
Distribution of game
assets in Unreal Engine

(No)SQL - By Availability vs
Consistency
7
Pick Two
Availability
Partition
Tolerance
Consistency

NoSQL - By Data Model
Key / Value Redis, Aerospike, RocksDB
Document store MongoDB, Couchbase
Wide column store Scylla, Apache Cassandra,
HBase, DynamoDB
Graph Neo4j, JanusGraph
Complexity
8

9
Satish Chandra Gupta
https://towardsdatascience.com/datastore-choices-
sql-vs-nosql-database-ebec24d
NoSQL - By Data Model

Active/Active, replicated, auto-sharded
10
Tunable, Eventual Consistency
App
App
App
App
App
App
CL= Local
Quorum
CL= One

11
Scylla Architecture
Source:
https://code.kiwi.com/nonstop-operations-with-scylla-even-through-the-ovhcloud-fire-4c0191e43ba1

Why is ScyllaDB Less
Expensive?

Why is ScyllaDB Less Expensive?
Higher Throughput
Lower Consistent Latency
Easier Administration

$$$ $$ $
Higher Throughput -> Less HW -> Lower Cost

Cassandra 4.0 vs. ScyllaDB
+ ScyllaDB can maintain 2x - 5x throughput
+ ScyllaDB adds nodes 3x faster

ScyllaDB vs Google Bigtable
ScyllaDB vs DynamoDB ScyllaDB vs Cassandra
1/7th the cost
26x performance
in real-life scenario
4 ScyllaDB nodes vs
40 Cassandra nodes
2.5X less expensive
1/5th cost
in real-life scenario
Higher Throughput -> Less HW -> Lower Cost

Lower Consistent Latency -> Higher Revenue
insideline.com site to reduce load times
from nine seconds to 1.4 seconds, ad
revenue increased three percent, and page
views-per-session went up 17 percent.
https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/future-of-marketing/digital-transformation/the-google-
gospel-of-speed-urs-hoelzle/
https://www.globaldots.com/resources/blog/latency-is-having-a-huge-negative-impact-on-ecommerce-c
ompanies
https://www.fastcompany.com/1825005/how-one-second-could-cost-amazon-16-billion-sales

Source: The ultimate guide to proper use of animation in UX
https://uxdesign.cc/the-ultimate-guide-to-proper-use-of-animation-in-ux-10bd98614fa9
Lower Consistent Latency -> Higher Revenue
Super Fast
1ms

Tail Latency - Why You Should Care
Refresh
User App Business
Logic
DB
API Calls DB Calls
Slowest 1% DB responses dominated UX latency

20
Consistent, Low Latencies
European Ecommerce Platform
+ 14,000,000 monthly users
+ Maintenance operations in
Cassandra → latency spikes
+ P99 comparison
+ 7X lower response times
with ScyllaDB
+ “Usable” P99 latencies

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ScyllaDB vs. Cassandra 4.0:
Latency vs Throughput
+ Cassandra 4.0 cannot
maintain useable
low latencies except
at very low throughput
(≤30-40k ops)
+ ScyllaDB can maintain
low latencies for far
greater throughputs
(≤170-180k ops)

+ 50% reads, 50% writes
+ Hotspot distribution
+ Goal Throughput: 100K which is 70% of ScyllaDB max capacity
Use Case Comparison
Latency Measured
Throughput
Yearly Cost
Mean Read Mean
Update
P99 Read P99 Update
ScyllaDB
Cloud
1.93 1.57 4.739 3.593 100.5K 29,172 $
Amazon
DynamoDB
5.51 6.59 37.695 41.951 100.K
(provisioned
120K)
278,172 $

Do the math yourself!
https://www.scylladb.com/product/scylla-cloud/get-pricing/?
writes=500000&reads=500000&storage=10&itemSize=1&re
plication=3

ScyllaDB reduces complexity in many ways:
+ Smaller footprint: Less to manage, less to fail
Less Complexity
24
MTBF =
∑ (start of downtime – start of uptime)
number of failures

ScyllaDB reduces complexity in many ways:
+ Smaller footprint: Less to manage, less to fail
+ No JVM tuning: No Java
Less Complexity
25

26
Replacing a Node
+ ScyllaDB can heal
clusters far faster than
Cassandra 4.0 by
spinning nodes up and
rebalancing data
+ ~3x - 4x faster

ScyllaDB reduces complexity in many ways:
+ Smaller footprint: Less to manage, less to fail
+ No JVM tuning: No Java
+ Self-optimizing: No tuning
Less Complexity
SELF-OPTIMIZING
27

Deployment Options
Install in Your Datacenter
➔ ScyllaDB Open Source
➔ ScyllaDB Enterprise
Install at a Cloud Provider
➔ ScyllaDB Open Source
➔ ScyllaDB Enterprise
Database as a Service
➔ Fully managed
ScyllaDB clusters
➔ 24*7 maintenance
and support.
On-Prem Cloud Hosted ScyllaDB Cloud
28

Why is ScyllaDB Less Expensive?
Higher Throughput -> Less HW -> Lower Cost
Lower Consistent Latency -> Higher Revenue
Easier Administration -> Better Sleep

Poll
Which of the following is most important to you?

How is ScyllaDB Less
Expensive?

32

Non Uniform Memory Access (NUMA)
33

What Happened?
34
+ Per thread performance plateaued
+ Cores: 1 ⟶ 256, NUMA
+ RAM: 2GB ⟶ 2TB
+ Disk space: 10GB ⟶ 10TB
+ Disk seek time: 10-20ms ⟶ 20µs
+ Network throughput: 1Gbps ⟶ 100Gbps
This year: 64/128 cores/threads/cpu, 400Gbps NIC, Disk 10µs latency, 1.5TB/device, DDR5
2TB/DIMM
AWS u-24tb1.metal: 224 cores, 448 threads, 24TB RAM

Horizontal & Vertical Scaling
Deep Technical Advancements
Built in C++
(no Java overhead)
System and Data
Center Aware
Sharding Per Core Shard-Aware Drivers
Auto-Performance
Tuning
Network
Processor NUMA
Storage
35
Unique Close-to-Metal Architecture

ScyllaDB Design Decisions
1
2 All Things Async
3 Shard per Core
4 Unified Cache
5 I/O Scheduler
6 Autonomous
C++ instead of Java

ScyllaDB Design Decisions
1
2 All Things Async
3 Shard per Core
4 Unified Cache
5 I/O Scheduler
6 Autonomous
C++ instead of Java

ScyllaDB Design Decisions
Threads Shards
1 C++ instead of Java
2 All Things Async
3 Shard per Core
4 Unified Cache
5 I/O Scheduler
6 Autonomous

ScyllaDB Design Decisions
Legacy NoSQL ScyllaDB
Key cache
Row cache
On-heap /
Off-heap
Linux page cache
SSTables
Unified cache
SSTables
Complex
Tuning
1
2 All Things Async
3 Shard per Core
4 Unified Cache
5 I/O Scheduler
6 Autonomous
C++ instead of Java

ScyllaDB Design Decisions
Legacy NoSQL ScyllaDB
Key cache
Row cache
On-heap /
Off-heap
Linux page cache
SSTables
Unified cache
SSTables
App
thread
Kernel
SSD
Page fault
Suspend thread
Initiate I/O
Context switch
I/O
completes
Interrupt
Context
switch
Map page
Resume
thread
Page fault
1
2 All Things Async
3 Shard per Core
4 Unified Cache
5 I/O Scheduler
6 Autonomous
C++ instead of Java

https://db.cs.cmu.edu/papers/2022/
cidr2022-p13-crotty.pdf

ScyllaDB Design Decisions
Query
Commitlog
Compaction
Userspace
I/O
Scheduler
Disk
Max useful disk concurrency
I/O queued in
FS/device
No
queues
Queue
Queue
Queue
1
2 All Things Async
3 Shard per Core
4 Unified Cache
5 I/O Scheduler
6 Autonomous
C++ instead of Java

ScyllaDB Design Decisions
Memtable
Seastar
Scheduler
Compaction
Query
Repair
Commitlog
SSD
Compaction
Backlog Monitor
Memory Monitor
Adjust priority
Adjust priority
WAN
CPU
1
2 All Things Async
3 Shard per Core
4 Unified Cache
5 I/O Scheduler
6 Autonomous
C++ instead of Java

Scheduler Safety Area

I4i NVMe Storage

Latest Results I3 vs I4 - 3 Node Cluster
Big thanks to Michał
Chojnowski for benchmarking
all the new AWS instances
types!
I3.16xlarge vs i4.16xlarge (64 vCPU servers)
50% Reads / 50% Writes
Latency tests with 50% of the max throughput
67% better price/performance!

Deep dive into Low Latency Engineering
https://www.p99conf.io/

Workload Prioritization

Different Types of Loads
■ OLTP
● Small work items
● Latency sensitive
● involves narrow
portion of the data
■ OLAP
● Large work items
● Throughput oriented
● Performed on large
amounts of data

Enterprise Only: Workload Prioritization
50
100 shares
Ratio = 100:100 (1:1) means equal shares of
processing/resources to complete tasks
Ratio = 100:50 (2:1) means 2X as many shares of processing/resources
for Analytics to complete tasks compared to Transactions
100 shares
100 shares
50 shares
OLAP
OLTP
Which Task to Run

How Does it Work?

Summary

53
962 C* nodes to 78!
60% TCO
95% latency

54
<1ms P99
Zero downtime
TCO
From Redis + Elasticsearch to ScyllaDB

Out-of-order solved
55
Real-time workloads
on 3 AWS nodes
“No one even realizes we are processing the entirety
of Zillow’s property and listings data.”
– Dan Podhola, Principle Engineer
Process all Zillow data
in <1 day with no
performance hit to
real-time

56
operational complexity
operational costs
(for 1,000+ dbs!)
app throughput
“It was comparable to the solution with Kafka, and we
didn’t have to add, manage, and maintain another data
product in our ecosystem.”
– Daniel Belenky, Palo Alto Networks

57
1000% throughput
90% EC2 costs
Rapiddeployment
“ScyllaDB turned out to be a game-changer in terms of
performance and the types of analysis our application
is able to do effortlessly.”
– Krishna Palati, DevOps Engineering

58
“It’s been a quiet, well-behaved database (it’s okay to say this because I’m
not on-call this week). We’re not having weekend-long firefights, nor are we
juggling nodes in the cluster to attempt to preserve uptime. It’s a much more
efficient database.”
- Bo Ingram, Discord
Trillions of messages
60% fewer nodes
5msp99
Gamechangers
https://thenewstack.io/how-discord-migrated-trillions-of-message
s-to-scylladb/

Summary
+ ScyllaDB is compatible with Apache Cassandra, Amazon DynamoDB
and can run on multiple platforms
+ ScyllaDB is less expensive and has lower tail latency
+ You can migrate to ScyllaDB without downtime

What a Difference a Database Makes
ScyllaDB vs. DynamoDB
1/5th cost
20x higher throughput
ScyllaDB vs. Google Bigtable
1/5th the cost
26x higher throughput
ScyllaDB vs. Cassandra
5x higher throughput
2-20x lower latency

Q&A
Get Started with
ScyllaDB Cloud Free Trial:
scylladb.com/cloud

Thank you
for joining us today.
@scylladb scylladb/
slack.scylladb.com
@scylladb company/scylladb/
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