plateau

plateau¹ is a low-profile event and log aggregator

Features

• Fast. Single-node throughput of up to 1M 128-byte records/s on common cloud hardware.
• Record grouping via "topic", write parallelism via "partition".
• Fixed-size per-topic retention policies with additional optional age-based expiration.
• Graceful failure under load via predictable load shedding.

Architecture

plateau is divided into two high-level components: the manifest and segment storage.

The Manifest

The manifest tracks high-level metadata about segments such as size, alongside time and logical index spans.

The manifest tracks per-partition state of each topic. It optimizes record queries by indexing segment spans so that it queries only need to read relevant segments. It is also used for tracking and hitting retention targets.

Currently, the only supported manifest is a local SQLite database.

Segment Storage

Segment storage is responsible for bulk batch storage of records. Records are grouped into "segments" of variable size. Writes are optimized by writing segment data in bulk. This aggregates writes and reduces manifest commits, which is critical for high throughput.

The "segment log" (slog) is a sequence of segments. It provides an interface to finalize segments at specified boundaries, cache and commit current segment data, and roll out new segments.

A slog does not track any of its own state (e.g. current segment index). The partition data stored in the manifest is used for this purpose. Each partition is backed by a single slog.

slog write parallelism is achieved with a background per-partition writer thread. This also enables load shedding. If a background write is in progress and the current segment is full, incoming records are rejected until the write clears.

Currently, the only supported segment storage type is bulk indexed Parquet files.

Future Work

plateau will eventually have pluggable backends for the manifest and bulk segment store. These could be selected transparently while using the same ingest and query API.

plateau will also eventually support replication to bulk object storage (e.g. S3). Other types of replication may be added as needed.

The current design uses per-partition threads for simplicity. A future switch to an async I/O system could enable much higher partition counts.

plateau is currently only designed to run as a single node for speed and simplicity. At some point, it may gain redundant bulk storage and HA manifest plugins that will allow it to operate with high availability.