Lightning talk about membase at the Munich on Rails meeting in December 2010

1. Membase Lightning
Talk
Christian van der Leeden, CIO, Scoreloop

2. Origin
• Used by Zynga to power their social gaming
backend
• Founded by the creator of memcache
• Available as Open Source or Commercial
(supported) product

3. Memcache
• Key Value Store
• Memcache Protocol
Memcache (Binary/ASCII)

4. Persistent
Memcache
Memcache
• Every key/value is made
persistent (in sqlite)
persistence engine
sqlite

5. Sharded
•using vbuckets (collection of keys)
• can use any vbucket aware client (e.g. moxi)
• there is a default balancer on the “master”
Moxi
Memcache Memcache ...
persistance persistance

6. Replicated
• using vbuckets (collection of keys)
vbucket vbucket’
Memcache Memcache
persistance persistance ...
TAP protocol
ns_server ns_server

7. Notes
• only manual fail over
• rebalancing happens without interruption
• Moxi can be installed on client or membase server
(or implemented in client library)
• membase bucket (virtual membase server)
• can set replication factor
• and determine size in memory

8. Personal notes
• Very nice UI to manage
• easy setup
• pretty young (not too active mailing list/irc channel)
• perfect fit for rails app since drop in replacement for memcache
• We use it with dalli (https://github.com/mperham/dalli)
• source compile is tough getting it right
• is a mixture of many components (memcache, persistance engine,
libevent, ns_server, erlang )
• we use it as persistent memcache currently

9. More Information
• http://www.membase.org
• irc: #membase on freenode.net
• http://groups.google.com/group/membase