FASTER
Fast key-value store from Microsoft Research.
Introduction
Managing large application state easily and with high performance is one of the hardest problems in the cloud today. We present FASTER, a new concurrent key-value store designed for point lookups and heavy updates. FASTER supports data larger than memory, by leveraging fast external storage. What differentiates FASTER are its cache-optimized index that achieves very high performance — up to 160 million operations per second when data fits in memory; its unique “hybrid record log” design that combines a traditional persistent log with in-place updates, to shape the memory working set and retain performance; and its architecture as an component that can be embedded in cloud apps. FASTER achieves higher throughput than current systems, by more than two orders of magnitude, and scales better than current pure in-memory data structures, for in-memory working sets. FASTER also offers a new consistent recovery scheme that achieves better performance at the expense of slightly higher commit latency.