Building distributed database systems correctly from the ground up is a notoriously hard problem. We have seen this firsthand building Docstore at Uber.
This is one of the most confusing aspects of the modern data infrastructure industry, why does every new system have to completely rebuild (not even reinvent!) the wheel? Vendors are spending so much time rebuilding existing solutions, they end up not solving the actual end users’ problems, although ostensibly that's why they decided to create a new data platform in the first place!
In this post we talk about our approach to building Tigris - the open source developer data platform. We talk about why we chose to build on top of FoundationDB, one of the most reliable distributed KV store with an amazing correctness story. We also go into detail about our experience using it.