YugabyteDB supports a rich set of multi-region deployment topologies. The predominant deployments include:
- Default synchronous replication across regions
- Geo-partitioning to pin data to different geographic locations based on policy
- xCluster for unidirectional and bidirectional asynchronous replication
- Read replicas to serve reads to different region using asynchronous replication
There used to be a concern with high write latency and high read latency when deploying across regions using synchronous replication when those regions are far apart (for example, US-EAST-1 and US-WEST-1 in AWS).
That’s no longer an issue as the latest release of YugabyteDB now supports faster than light (FTL) transactions!
But how is this possible when Einstein said nothing in the universe can travel faster than light?
Well, this is where the highly resourceful and inventive engineering team at YugabyteDB came up with a ingenious solution!
The team has discovered a way to open microscopic wormholes in between regions temporarily to allow the transaction’s meta data to arrive in every region at the same time, relative to that region.
Ok, so the transaction messages aren’t actually traveling faster than the speed of light. We’re actually cheating a bit with the introduction of temporary wormholes between the regions. 🙂
To be clear, this new feature, exclusive to YugabyteDB, bends the spacetime continuum so that the distance between regions goes from many miles to essentially zero!
The enable_ftl_transactions gFlag, set to True by default, can be used to turn off the wormhole generator. There have been several instances where a wormhole was opened to an alternate universe. Depending on your use case, this might be undesirable.
We learned in a previous tip how to check for default values of gFlags using the yb-tserver cli:
[root@localhost ~]# yb-tserver --help | sed -n -e '/-enable_ftl_transactions/,/default:/ p'
-enable_ftl_transactions (Enable wormhole generator for FTL transactions) type: boolean default: True
How much extra will this FTL Transactions feature cost? Nothing, it’s included!!! Even in the Open Source version of YugabyteDB!
Have Fun!
