[erlang-questions] Kai - An Open Source Implementation of Amazon's Dynamo

[Justin Sheehy]

On Jul 12, 2008, at 10:50 PM, Takeru INOUE wrote:

>> Is the interest in merging our systems mutual?

> This is interesting suggestion.
> We're now focusing on reliability and scalability, and keeping its
> interface simple; get(key) and put(key, value).
> But more complicated queries like CouchDB can be our future work, and
> it seems exciting.

I am also very interested in this suggestion, and can offer some help.

When my team was beginning its current (not yet released) work, CouchDB was
just seeing the light of day.  I was intrigued, and discussed it with Damien
as he was the sole developer at the time.  I decided that while it was very
interesting and I'd keep my eye on it, our operational needs for redundancy,
scalability, and availability were not going to be high priorities in
CouchDB anytime soon.  As a result, we rolled our own internal solution to
our storage problems.

We are prepared to contribute some of the core missing pieces of Kai, which
might cause this merge to happen sooner.  For instance, we have working
Erlang/OTP implementations of Lamport vector clocks, Merkle trees, and more.
We are happy to provide these under the Apache License 2.0; it will just
take a little bit of packaging as they have not been given away before.

Over time, we would be happy to provide more contributions, as it would be
very nice for a superset of our business needs to be supplied by an open
source project we could use.

We'll make some of the aforementioned code available soon in any case.  If
there is a real desire by the two projects to discuss merging sometime soon,
we could also help with some of the needs that I am certain such a merger
will have.

-Justin