Software Engineer based in Pittsburgh, PA. Engineering Manager at Google, building large-scale data systems. Creator of rqlite[1], the lightweight, distributed database built on SQLite.
One application that comes up over and over again -- wanting relational modeling, along with HA, but with low operational costs. People sometimes start with Postgres, then need to set up HA, and find it's a lot of work. They realize that their data set requirements are not huge, don't need fancy features, so start to think Postgres is overkill. That's what Replicated found.
I grew up in Ireland, moved to the USA as an adult. European government is clearly Hobbes in model, the US Lockean.
In Europe the individual has almost no legal reason to use force, and force by individuals is considered illegitimate. The "Sovereign" has all the coercive power in European states. In the US, however, a certain amount of legitimate force explicitly remains with the individual i.e. the 2nd amendment. (I am not making a value judgement here).
Of course, Europe has government with the consent of the governed, so is Lockean in that sense. But the balance of force between the "Sovereign" and the people in Europe is all Hobbes. You only notice it when you move to the US and compare it to Europe.
Europe had centuries of religious and civil war. It's not surprising Hobbes won out.
rqlite creator here, happy to answer any questions.
As for reliability - it's a fault-tolerant, highly available system. Reliability is the reason it exists. :-) If you're asking about quality and test coverage, you might like to check out these resources:
>First of all, does anyone believe that highly scrutinized and bureaucratic functions are general high quality services?
This is the only part of your response that doesn't quite sit right with me. There could be many "highly scrutinized and bureaucratic functions" out there that are working very well, you just don't notice because they work so well. There could be a selection-effect here.
Quality is a big deal for me[1]. But I think you're defining "quality" too narrowly in this context. "Quality" could also mean "allows everyone, at scale, reliably, to do what they need to do." The US Tax Filing system (and its associated software) meets that goal.
I did introduce Queued Writes[1] since that talk, allowing you to trade off performance versus immediate durability. It may interest you -- network is much less of a factor then, and you should get a 10-100x increase in throughput.
Will it allow you to reach the same scale in terms of data set size that Elasticsearch supports? Almost certainly no, but it might be enough depending on your use case.
rqlite creator here. I have performed a fair amount of performance testing, some of which I outlined in a talk to the CMU Database Group a few years ago. Details:
An important thing to note: this testing was done 4+ years ago, on moderately-powerful hardware for the time. With higher-end, more modern hardware you may get even better results.
Nit: dqlite is a library, it is not a network-exposed database like rqlite is. Sure, it requires connecting to other nodes over the network, but local access is via in-process. In contrast one connects with rqlite over the network - HTTP specifically.
rqlite[1] author here. Just to be clear, rqlite is not SQLite but rewritten in Go. rqlite uses the vanilla C code, and calls it from Go[2]. I consider that an important advantage over other approaches -- rqlite gets all the benefits of rock-solid[3] SQLite. As result there are no questions about the quality of the database engine.
FWIW, I built hraftd[1] many years ago to make it easy to play with a simple distributed system, but one that uses a production-grade implementation of Raft[2]. You can spin up a cluster in seconds on a single machine, kill nodes, watch a new Leader get elected, and so on.
It's written in Go, so it'll help if you are familiar with Go. But the code is not difficult to understand even if you don't.
https://www.philipotoole.com
[1] https://www.rqlite.io