Database Reliability Engineering

Chapter 12. A Data Architecture Sampler

Now that we’ve gone over storage engines and individual datastores, let’s broaden our view to look at how those datastores can fit within multisystem architectures. Rare is the architecture that only involves one datastore. The reality is that there will be multiple ways to save data, multiple consumers of that data, and multiple producers of data. In this chapter, we present you a delightful little sampler of architectural components that are often used to enable our datastores followed by a few data-driven architectures that are found in the wild and the problems they attempt to solve.

Although this will be no where close to comprehensive, it should give you an excellent overview of the ecosystem and what to look for. This chapter will help you understand the effective uses for these components as well as the ways in which they can affect your data services, both positively and negatively.

Architectural Components

Each of these components falls within the purview of the day-to-day duties of the database reliability engineer (DBRE). Gone are the days when we can ignore all of the components around the data ecosystem. Each of these components has a definitive impact on overall data service availability, data integrity, and consistency. There is no way to ignore them when designing services and operational processes.

Frontend Datastores

The frontend database is the bread and butter of much of what we have been discussing throughout this ...