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Alternator: DynamoDB API in Scylla

Introduction

Alternator is a Scylla feature adding compatibility with Amazon DynamoDB(TM). DynamoDB's API uses JSON-encoded requests and responses which are sent over an HTTP or HTTPS transport. It is described in detail in Amazon's DynamoDB API Reference.

Our goal is that any application written to use Amazon DynamoDB could be run, unmodified, against Scylla with Alternator enabled. Alternator's compatibility with DynamoDB is fairly complete, but users should be aware of some differences and some unimplemented features. The extent of Alternator's compatibility with DynamoDB is described in the Scylla Alternator for DynamoDB users document, which is updated as the work on Alternator progresses and compatibility continues to improve.

Alternator also adds several features and APIs that are not available in DynamoDB. These are described in Alternator-specific APIs.

Running Alternator

By default, Scylla does not listen for DynamoDB API requests. To enable this API in Scylla you must set at least two configuration options, alternator_port and alternator_write_isolation. For example in the YAML configuration file:

alternator_port: 8000
alternator_write_isolation: only_rmw_uses_lwt # or always, forbid or unsafe

or, equivalently, via command-line arguments: `--alternator-port=8000 --alternator-write-isolation=only_rmw_uses_lwt.

the alternator_port option determines on which port Scylla listens for DynamoDB API requests. By default, it listens on this port on all network interfaces. To listen only on a specific interface, configure also the alternator_address option.

The meaning of the alternator_write_isolation option is explained in the "Write isolation policies" section of Alternator-specific APIs. Alternator has four different choices for the implementation of writes, each with different advantages. You should carefully consider which of the options makes more sense for your intended use case and configure alternator_write_isolation accordingly. There is currently no default for this option: Trying to run Scylla with an Alternator port selected but without configuring write isolation will result in an error message, asking you to set it.

In addition to (or instead of) serving HTTP requests on alternator_port, Scylla can accept DynamoDB API requests over HTTPS (encrypted), on the port specified by alternator_https_port. As usual for HTTPS servers, the operator must specify certificate and key files. By default these should be placed in /etc/scylla/scylla.crt and /etc/scylla/scylla.key, but these default locations can overridden by specifying --alternator-encryption-options keyfile="..." and --alternator-encryption-options certificate="...".

By default, Scylla saves a snapshot of deleted tables. But Alternator does not offer an API to restore these snapshots, so these snapshots are not useful and waste disk space - deleting a table does not recover any disk space. It is therefore recommended to disable this automatic-snapshotting feature by configuring the auto_snapshot option to false. See also scylladb#5283.

DynamoDB applications specify a single "endpoint" address, e.g., dynamodb.us-east-1.amazonaws.com. Behind the scenes, a DNS server and/or load balancers distribute the connections to many different backend nodes. Alternator does not provide such a load-balancing setup, so you should either set one up, or set up the client library to do the load balancing itself. Instructions, code and examples for doing this can be found in the Alternator Load Balancing project.

Alternator design and implementation

This section provides only a very brief introduction to Alternator's design. A much more detailed document about the features of the DynamoDB API and how they are, or could be, implemented in Scylla can be found in: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1i4yjF5OSAazAY_-T8CBce9-2ykW4twx_E_Nt2zDoOVs

Almost all of Alternator's source code (except some initialization code) can be found in the alternator/ subdirectory of Scylla's source code. Extensive functional tests can be found in the test/alternator subdirectory. These tests are written in Python, and can be run against both Alternator and Amazon's DynamoDB; This allows verifying that Alternator's behavior matches the one observed on DynamoDB. See test/alternator/README.md for more information about the tests and how to run them.

With Alternator enabled on port 8000 (for example), every Scylla node listens for DynamoDB API requests on this port. These requests, in JSON format over HTTP, are parsed and result in calls to internal Scylla C++ functions - there is no CQL generation or parsing involved. In Scylla terminology, the node receiving the request acts as the the coordinator, and often passes the request on to one or more other nodes - replicas which hold copies of the requested data.

Alternator tables are stored as Scylla tables, each in a separate keyspace. Each keyspace is initialized when the corresponding Alternator table is created (with a CreateTable request). The replication factor (RF) for this keyspace is chosen at that point, depending on the size of the cluster: RF=3 is used on clusters with three or more nodes, and RF=1 is used for smaller clusters. Such smaller clusters are, of course, only recommended for tests because of the risk of data loss.

Each table in Alternator is stored as a Scylla table in a separate keyspace. The DynamoDB key columns (hash and sort key) have known types, and become partition and clustering key columns of the Scylla table. All other attributes may be different for each row, so are stored in one map column in Scylla, and not as separate columns.

DynamoDB supports two consistency levels for reads, "eventual consistency" and "strong consistency". These two modes are implemented using Scylla's CL (consistency level) feature: All writes are done using the LOCAL_QUORUM consistency level, then strongly-consistent reads are done with LOCAL_QUORUM, while eventually-consistent reads are with just LOCAL_ONE.

In Scylla (and its inspiration, Cassandra), high write performance is achieved by ensuring that writes do not require reads from disk. The DynamoDB API, however, provides many types of requests that need a read before the write (a.k.a. RMW requests - read-modify-write). For example, a request may copy an existing attribute, increment an attribute, be conditional on some expression involving existing values of attribute, or request that the previous values of attributes be returned. These read-modify-write transactions should be isolated from each other, so by default Alternator implements every write operation using Scylla's LWT (lightweight transactions). This default can be overridden on a per-table basis, by tagging the table as explained above in the "write isolation policies" section.

DynamoDB allows attributes to be nested - a top-level attribute may be a list or a map, and each of its elements may further be lists or maps, etc. Alternator currently stores the entire content of a top-level attribute as one JSON object. This means that UpdateItem requests which want modify a non-top-level attribute directly (e.g., a.b[3].c) need RMW: Alternator implements such requests by reading the entire top-level attribute a, modifying only a.b[3].c, and then writing back a.

Currently, Alternator doesn't use Tablets. That's because Alternator relies on LWT (lightweight transactions), and LWT is not supported in keyspaces with Tablets enabled.

.. toctree::
    :maxdepth: 2
    :hidden:

    getting-started
    compatibility
    new-apis