Developing Highly Performant Collaborative Applications Using Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types (CRDT)

For almost two decades, the CAP (Consistency-Availability-Partition) theorem has been the gold standard for distributed database systems. With network latency being the unavoidable contributing factor for network partition, most solutions are designed with an understanding that they had to make a choice between consistency and availability.

Watch a live demo with code walkthrough on how to apply the CRDTs for the following use cases:

1. Global voting machine (G-counter)
2. Distributed caching (register)
3. Shared session (PN-counter, G-sets)
4. Multi-region IoT data ingest (sequence)

Conflict-free replicated data type (CRDT) bends the CAP theorem to deliver data availability with strong eventual consistency. CRDTs are special data types that converge the data from all database replicas. The popular CRDTs are G-counters(grow-only counters), PN-counters(positive-negative counters), registers, G-sets(grow-only sets), OR-sets(observed-remove sets), etc. CRDT-based databases promise local latency for geo-distributed applications. Applications that fall in the category of e-commerce, gaming, social, collaboration can use CRDTs to deliver highly engaging user experience.

Redis has a head start with the CRDTs — it already has a rich portfolio of data structures: Strings, Hashes, Lists, Sets, Sorted Sets, Bitfields, Geo, Hyperloglog and Streams. Redis Enterprise extends some of the popular data structures as CRDTs. It also introduces a new data type for counter.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Roshan Kumar, Sr. Product Manager, Redis

Roshan Kumar is a Sr. Product Manager at Redis. He has extensive experience in software development and marketing in the technology sector. In the past, Roshan has worked at Hewlett-Packard, and many successful Silicon Valley startups – ZillionTV, Salorix, Alopa, and ActiveVideo to name a few. As an enthusiastic programmer, he designed and developed mindzeal.com, an online platform hosting computer programming courses for young students. Roshan holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, and MBA from Santa Clara University, California, USA.