Hi Emilie, nice project, thanks for sharing. I’m curious whether there were any decisions that you added mainly for educational value even though you wouldn’t make the same call in a production system?
- Raft + 2PC together, as above, so people can see how distributed consensus and cross-shard atomicity actually operate and interplay (with their trade-offs);
- Several subsystems are written for readability and transparency (clean error propagation, explicit structures) even if that means a few more allocations or some lost microseconds;
- The storage layer offers different backends (RocksDB, Sled, in-memory) to let users experiment and understand their behavior, not because it’s always ideal to support so many;
- Features such as CDC (Change Data Capture), admin metrics, WAL status, and even “over-promiscuous” logs are exposed for teaching/tracing/debugging, though those might be reduced or hardened in production;
- Much of the CLI/admin API exposes “how the sausage is made,” which is gold for learning but might be hidden in a SaaS-like setting;
So yes, if I targeted only hyperscale production, some internals would be simplified or streamlined, but the educational and transparency value is central to this project’s DNA.