C5: A simple, reliable, scalable, open-source database

- We say we can do failover in a couple of seconds. We want to make it subsecond, but we can't do that reliably yet. In HBase this story is much more mixed. - We wanted to really reduce complexity, as a result, you can just apt-get install c5 on each node and you are done. It's one daemon, one log file, and that's it. No xmx nonsense, and almost no tuning or config files. I don't know if you have dealt with hadoop before, but the complexity is high. - Finally we have a much more advanced wireformat. In fact it's advanced by being simple (protobufs + http). As a result clients in languages other than java become very easy, without a thrift client.

In the future expect even cooler features, but for v1 we are just aiming for HBase compat.

The issues arise during fail over and the architecture of how HBase and HDFS interact. That is where the most changes are, and while it seems scary, I think people will find the changes most refreshing, and cut out literally hundreds of thousands of lines of code out of the write and read paths!