ScyllaDB Engineering Resources

ScyllaDB's Architecture for Extreme Scale

CTO Avi Kivity shares how scalability is core to ScyllaDB’s architecture.

A Deep Dive into ScyllaDB’s Architecture

Take a technical deep dive into ScyllaDB's architecture and discover the "secret sauce" behind our high availability and superior performance.

ScyllaDB: 10 Years and Beyond

There’s a common adage that it takes 10 years to develop a file system. As ScyllaDB reaches that 10 year milestone in 2025, it’s the perfect time to reflect on the last decade of ScyllaDB development

ScyllaDB’s Monstrous Engineering Advances

Join ScyllaDB CTO and co-founder Avi Kivity as he highlights the engineering milestones achieved over the past year, diving into new features, performance improvements, and innovations. Plus, get an e

Quantifying the Performance Impact of Shard-per-core Architecture

Most software isn’t architected to take advantage of modern hardware. How does a shard-per-code and shared-nothing architecture help – and exactly what impact can it make?

Tablets: Rethinking Replication

Avi Kivity and Dor Laor AMA: “Tablets” replication, all things async, caching, object storage & more

Dor Laor and Avi Kivity discuss the new tablets replication algorithm (replacing Vnodes), ScyllaDB’s async shard-per-core architecture, strategies for tapping object storage with S3, the CDC...

Why ScyllaDB is Moving to a New Replication Algorithm: Tablets

How moving from vnode-based replication to tablets helps dynamically distribute data across the cluster, ultimately increasing ScyllaDB's elasticity.

Inside ScyllaDB’s Internal Cache

Why ScyllaDB completely bypasses the Linux cache during reads, using its own highly efficient row-based cache instead.

Extreme Elasticity with Tablets, Raft and Kubernetes

Recent ScyllaDB versions have improved elasticity using Tablets and Raft-based Consistent Topology Changes, allowing for fast bootstrapping and parallel scaling. A demo presents doubling cluster size

Surviving Majority Loss: When a Leader Fails

In this lightning talk I will present all common combinations of ScyllaDB deployments, single and multi-DC, and how well they play out with Raft based topology management. I'll present ScyllaDB's 2024

Topology on Raft: An Inside Look

ScyllaDB 6.0 completes the transition to strong consistency for all of the cluster metadata; learn what this means for users.

ScyllaDB’s Path to Strong Consistency: A New Milestone

In ScyllaDB 5.2, Raft is GA and used for the propagation of schema changes. Quickly assembling a fresh cluster, performing concurrent schema changes, updating node's IP addresses – all of this is...

What’s Next on ScyllaDB’s Path to Strong Consistency

What's next on ScyllaDB's path to strong consistency with Raft? Topology changes will be safe and fast: we won't be bound by ring delay any longer, and operator mistakes won't corrupt the cluster.

Workload Prioritization: How to Balance Multiple Workloads in a Cluster

Workload Prioritization is a ScyllaDB exclusive feature for controlling how different workloads compete for system resources. It's used to prioritize urgent application requests that require immediate

Exploring ScyllaDB’s DynamoDB-Compatible API

In this talk we inspect how ScyllaDB implemented Alternator, the DynamoDB-compatible API. We review internal table structure, load balancing and deployment characteristics. We also inspect an existing

ScyllaDB is No Longer “Just a Faster Cassandra”

Predictable performance isn't just a feature—it's a must for anyone building serious, data-intensive applications at scale. ScyllaDB has often been labeled merely as a faster alternative to Cassandra,

Reduce Your Cloud Spend with ScyllaDB

This talk will explore why ScyllaDB Cloud is a cost-effective alternative to DynamoDB, highlighting efficient design implementations like shared compute, local NVMe storage, and storage compression. I