Tigris is a globally available, S3 compatible object storage service. Tigris utilizes FoundationDB's transactional key-value interface for its underlying metadata storage. This blog delves into the topics of serializable transactions, the mechanics of transactions within Tigris, and concurrency control.

The most complicated and time-consuming parts of building a new storage system are usually the edge cases and low-level details. Concurrency control, consistency, handling faults, load balancing, that kind of thing. Almost every mature storage system will have to grapple with all of these problems at one point or another. For example, at a high level, load balancing hot partitions across brokers in Kafka is not that different from load balancing hot shards in MongoDB, but each system ends up re-implementing a custom load-balancing solution instead of focusing on their differentiating value to end-developers.

This is one of the most confusing aspects of the modern data infrastructure industry, why does every new system have to completely rebuild (not even reinvent!) the wheel? Most of them decide to reimplement common processes and components without substantially increasing the value gained from reimplementing them. For instance, many database builders start from scratch when building their own storage and query systems, but often merely emulate existing solutions. These items usually take a massive undertaking just to get basic features working, let alone correct.