About TigerBeetle
Mission
We want to make it easy for others to build the next generation of financial services and applications without having to cobble together an accounting or ledger system of record from scratch.
TigerBeetle implements the latest research and technology to deliver unprecedented safety, durability and performance while reducing operational costs by orders of magnitude and providing a fantastic developer experience.
What Is A Tiger Beetle?
Two things got us interested in tiger beetles as a species:
Tiger beetles are ridiculously fast... a tiger beetle can run at a speed of 9 km/h, about 125 body lengths per second. That’s 20 times faster than an Olympic sprinter when you scale speed to body length, a fantastic speed-to-size ratio. To put this in perspective, a human would need to run at 480 miles per hour to keep up.
Tiger beetles thrive in different environments, from trees and woodland paths, to sea and lake shores, with the largest of tiger beetles living primarily in the dry regions of Southern Africa... and that's what we want for TigerBeetle, something that's fast and safe to deploy everywhere.
History
The Problem - Realtime Processing of Balance Updates
Processing events that impact the balance of an account must be done serially, in the correct order and reliably. For this reason, despite the trend to scale modern applications by distributing work across parallel threads/processes/machines, it remains difficult to scale a ledger or accounting system without sacrificing performance or safety.
For example, processing a balance update event involves:
- validating the event,
- processing any business rules that must consider the current balance before processing the event and the new balance after the event,
- updating the balance
- persisting the updated balance, and
- notifying subscribers of the updated balance and that the event has been processed.
While investigating a few existing systems it became clear that the majority of architectures cobble together generic databases (relational or NoSQL, on-disk or in-memory) with business logic enforced in the application code. This separation between data and code, persistence and logic, invites the worst of distributed system problems: network delays, multiple roundtrips for a single balance update, clock skew, or cache incoherency etc.
Furthermore, these systems may achieve performance but at the expense of reliability, especially in the face of hardware failure, corruption and misdirected writes, a compromise that is unacceptable for a system-of-record for financial accounts.
The Solution - A Purpose-Built Financial Accounting Database
Our survey led us to conclude that, while there are mechanisms available to shard account balances to parallelize updates and improve performance, there are still significant performance gains to be had in designing a database that is purpose built for storing balances and processing updates in a reliable manner.
ProtoBeetle - 400,000 Transfers per Second
In the month of July 2020, we developed a prototype of TigerBeetle in Node as a performance sketch to measure the basic components of the design (batching, TCP protocol, cryptographic checksums everywhere, fsync journalling, in-memory business logic and hash table operations). ProtoBeetle ran at 200,000 two-phase transfers per second on our office laptops, supporting our back-of-the-envelope numbers.
We then integrated ProtoBeetle into Mojaloop and our reference minimum deployment cluster of Mojaloop went from 76 TPS on MySQL to 1757 TPS on ProtoBeetle. A single stateless Mojaloop pod was unable to saturate ProtoBeetle. Most of the throughput was spent converting Mojaloop's individual HTTP requests into TCP batches.
Watch a 10-minute talk introducing ProtoBeetle.
AlphaBeetle - 800,000 Transfers per Second
After ProtoBeetle, from September through October 2020, we knuckled down and rewrote TigerBeetle in C/Zig to create the alpha version of TigerBeetle, using io_uring as a foundation for fast I/O.
TigerBeetle's Zig implementation of io_uring was submitted for addition to the Zig standard library.
Watch a presentation of TigerBeetle given to the Interledger community on 25 November 2020.
BetaBeetle - High Availability
BetaBeetle, the beta distributed version of TigerBeetle, was developed from January 2021 through August 2021, for strict serializability, fault tolerance and automated leader election with the pioneering Viewstamped Replication and consensus protocol, plus the CTRL protocol from Protocol-Aware Recovery for Consensus-Based Storage.
TigerBeetle - Into Production
You can read more about TigerBeetle's production readiness.
References
The collection of papers behind TigerBeetle:
LMAX - How to Do 100K TPS at Less than 1ms Latency - 2010 - Martin Thompson on mechanical sympathy and why a relational database is not the right solution.
The LMAX Exchange Architecture - High Throughput, Low Latency and Plain Old Java - 2014
- Sam Adams on the high-level design of LMAX.
LMAX Disruptor - A high performance alternative to bounded queues for exchanging data between concurrent threads.
Evolution of Financial Exchange Architectures - 2020 - Martin Thompson looks at the evolution of financial exchanges and explores the state of the art today.
Gray Failure - "The major availability breakdowns and performance anomalies we see in cloud environments tend to be caused by subtle underlying faults, i.e. gray failure rather than fail-stop failure."
The Tail at Store: A Revelation from Millions of Hours of Disk and SSD Deployments - "We find that storage performance instability is not uncommon: 0.2% of the time, a disk is more than 2x slower than its peer drives in the same RAID group (and 0.6% for SSD). As a consequence, disk and SSD-based RAIDs experience at least one slow drive (i.e., storage tail) 1.5% and 2.2% of the time."
The Tail at Scale - "A simple way to curb latency variability is to issue the same request to multiple replicas and use the results from whichever replica responds first."
Viewstamped Replication: A New Primary Copy Method to Support Highly-Available Distributed Systems
ZFS: The Last Word in File Systems (Jeff Bonwick and Bill Moore) - On disk failure and corruption, the need for checksums... and checksums to check the checksums, and the power of copy-on-write for crash-safety.
A Study of SSD Reliability in Large Scale Enterprise Storage Deployments
SDC 2018 - Protocol-Aware Recovery for Consensus-Based Storage - Why replicated state machines need to distinguish between a crash and corruption, and why it would be disastrous to truncate the journal when encountering a checksum mismatch.
Can Applications Recover from fsync Failures? - Why we use Direct I/O in TigerBeetle and why the kernel page cache is a dangerous way to recover the journal, even when restarting from an fsync() failure panic.
Coil's Mojaloop Performance Work 2020 - By Don Changfoot and Joran Dirk Greef, a performance analysis of Mojaloop's central ledger that sparked the idea for "an accounting database" as Adrian Hope-Bailie put it. And the rest, as they say, is history!