Staying ahead of the tech game often means pushing your application to perform at its best, especially when you hit the peak of user activity. Seeta Somagani, Global Field Engineering Director of Volt Active Data, shared insights and expertise on achieving limitless performance for apps during his masterclass at TechSparks 2023.
Volt Active Data is a streaming database company founded in 2009 by Dr Michael Stonebraker at MIT. Driven by the need for consistent data and high-performance capabilities, VoltDB has evolved to provide a unique combination of features that cater to the modern, data-intensive world.
Somagani opened the session by introducing the challenges that arise when scaling applications. As a startup, one can easily launch on the cloud, but as the user base grows, ensuring scalability without compromising consistency becomes paramount. Traditional relational databases (RDBMS), while reliable for transactional operations, often fall short in the face of the new era of automated, high-concurrency applications.
This is where Volt Active Data steps in. It bridges the gap between RDBMS and NoSQL databases, offering both consistency guarantees and high performance. In a world where data is continuously evolving, making real-time decisions based on this data is essential. VoltDB addresses this functional need while maintaining data integrity.
“Volt Active Data is built to be the best of both worlds of the relational databases, where you get the consistency guarantees, and also the performance of a NoSQL database when you need it,” Somagani said.
The challenges startups face when scaling include complexity, compromised consistency, and soaring costs. Managing data pipelines, relying on cloud-native tools, and dealing with the potential drawbacks of cloud lock-in are significant hurdles. VoltDB provides a solution to these challenges by offering scalability without sacrificing data integrity.
Somagani provided a high-level overview of Volt Active Data’s architecture. The platform allows for ingesting, storing, and aggregating data in real time. It empowers businesses to act swiftly on the intelligence generated from continuously evolving data. VoltDB plays a pivotal role in this process, ensuring low latency, high throughput, and data consistency.
To illustrate the real-world impact of VoltDB, Somagani called upon Bipul Karnani, Principal Engineer at Dream11, to share their experience with the platform.
Dream11, the largest fantasy sports platform globally, faces immense challenges due to its massive user base. During the Indian Premier League (IPL), they saw peak concurrency surpassing 10 million users. The platform hosts contests, manages lineups, and provides real-time leaderboards for users. The cricket match lineups announcement triggers a rush of user activity, with up to 70% of traffic arriving within 30 minutes of match time. Meeting the demands of such an enormous user base is a significant challenge.
“When you’re dealing with a system that is dealing with so many users, you also have to think about availability. And once you come into distributed systems, you will start seeing that people have often compromised on consistency to go for availability,” Karnani said.
Before adopting VoltDB, Dream11 faced limitations with their existing infrastructure. The team encountered issues related to hot node problems, transaction limits, and scalability restrictions with RDS Aurora. These constraints hindered their ability to ensure data consistency, high throughput, and low latency for their users.
Dream 11’s transition to VoltDB brought about a transformative change. It could ensure data consistency, meet the demands of high concurrency, and provide a seamless user experience. With VoltDB, it managed to handle 50,000 write requests per second and 200,000 read requests per second during an IPL mega contest, all with latency as low as 10 milliseconds.
“VoltDB performs at the highest level of consistency, which is strictly serialisable. And not just at an individual constraint level, but also across nodes across all replicas,” Karnani shared.
VoltDB empowered Dream11 to overcome its scalability challenges and meet the expectations of its massive user base. Dream11’s success story exemplifies the potential of Volt Active Data to transform the performance and scalability of applications.
Somagani’s masterclass on limitless performance for your app, with a focus on scaling after the peak, provided valuable insights into how Volt Active Data can revolutionise the way businesses manage their data and achieve high-performance goals. VoltDB’s blend of consistency and speed can unlock the full potential of modern applications, especially in a world where data is continually evolving.
