ApacheCon North America 2014

Apache HBase powers several popular applications at Facebook, most notably Facebook Messages. To ensure data availability in the face of large scale disruptive events, such as datacenter-wide power outages and network problems, Facebook uses asynchronous replication and failover. This approach however, puts a burden onto the application developers, each of whom must build their own solution to deal with eventual consistency.

As an answer to this problem, Facebook has built HydraBase, an iteration of HBase which synchronously replicates data to geographically dispersed hosts while maintaining strong consistency. This presentation will cover the design of this system; the changes made to HBase to support this type of replication while upholding the guarantees provided by HBase to application developers; and some early results and lessons learned from running this system in production.