atomix
request for clarification
Hello, I just discovered trinity and atomix. Looks great! I love the Jepsen tests, and the Clojure lib. This is more of a request for clarification, not an actual "issue".
I have questions about:
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persistence facilities. Is this a purely in-memory store? If not, how can I configure the file/folder where this is persisted? Can I backup it?
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Can I extend it with my own primitives? Ie. if I wanted to implement a durable (stored to disk) immutable (like Clojure/Datomic without the datalog part) data structure, where would I start? Can I build on/extend atomix (then I would probably try) or would I have to drop to the Raft implementation (then I would probably not try)?
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Can I start a server from Clojure as well and maybe avoid the cost of serialization/deserialization etc. ? It would make it easier to start playing, and also simplify deployments in my case.
Hi @nha -
So Trinity is pretty barebones - we basically created it just to make Jepsen testing a bit easier. That said, that Atomix APIs are pretty straightforward, as you can see from Trinity, so using them from Clojure isn't that difficult. As for your questions:
- Atomix can store on disk (durable), in memory, or memory mapped. You specify the type of storage you want via a Storage object which is then supplied to your replica.
- You certainly can create your own primitives. That's the primary selling point of Atomix - being able to create your own state machines, essentially, that will automatically handle and replicate operations in a strongly consistent way. Here are some docs on that. You might also be interested in this blog post which describes how to build a custom datastore using the Copycat APIs, which Atomix is based on and more or less similar.
- Sure you can run Atomix from Clojure. Re: serialization, Atomix still needs to replicate your operations across servers, which it does by serializing them. There's no way to avoid that.
It seems like there have been significant api changes. I seem to be able to make a storage object, but cannot find the Replica anymore.