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TransLattice inks partnership with Amazon's AWS cloud

Flavors Bezos's cloud with Google-esque database tech

Distributed-database company TransLattice has sailed into Amazon's AWS Partner Network, giving developers confidence that they'll get the most out of their database when running it on the AWS cloud.

The company announced on Tuesday that it had gained AWS Partner Network Standard Technology Partner certification (snappy acronym: AWSPNSTP*).

This means that the TransLattice Elastic Database (TED) has been thoroughly tested across all AWS availability zones and regions, that Amazon has been happy with the performance, and that TransLattice will get access to some of AWS's technical innards, which should allow it to develop the technology to squeeze the most out of Bezos's cloud.

The TED technology gives developers access to a PostgresSQL-based database with geo-redundancy, global replication, and the ability to scale to hundreds of thousands of concurrent writes. Previously, only Google was known to operate such a technology via its secretive, proprietary "Spanner" database.

"With TED on AWS, organizations can deliver resilience solutions with like-local performance to users anywhere in the world using a single, easy to manage database that spans multiple geographic locations," Frank Huerta, chief executive of TransLattice, said in a statement.

The TransLattice technology automatically partitions SQL database tables into groups or rows which are then redundantly stored across the available computing infrastructure – in the case of Amazon, your data can get plonked down in AWS data centers around the world, adding both redundancy and the opportunity for failover in the case of a regional cloud brownout.

This also lets developers build latency-sensitive applications that share a single, global database, which saves on the inevitable headaches of replicating changes between different datastores.

TransLattice uses a peer-to-peer structure to let it write globally without having to suffer the latency overhead that typically comes with traditional databases, which need to pass locks back and forth to check for consistency.

Instead, TED forms a graph of transactions that sees changes propagate through select groups of nodes, and "whoever gets to a majority of nodes first in the case of a transaction wins in the case of a conflict," TransLattice CTO Mike Lyle told The Register.

This differs marginally from Google's method of conflict resolution in Spanner, which uses a "TrueTime API" that relies on atomic clocks and GPS receivers to be able to write globally and sync locally.

TransLattice can handle objects and comes with enterprise features such as data-location policy setting, compliance, and the ability to run on local high-end hardware as well as low-powered cloud instances, unlike Google's Spanner which is a – admittedly lightning-fast – key-value store.

"There's a couple of things out there like Spanner, and realistically they're never going to get into the markets we're after because it's really hard to build in [enterprise] business logic and queries," Lyle said.

Though TransLattice is pleased by its cloud partnership with Amazon, it will not provide public pricing for running its technology in the cloud. ®

Bootnote

A quick note to our beloved Reg commenters with a wee bit of the pedant about them: yes, we do know that an acronym is, as our dictionary defines it, "an abbreviation formed from the initial letters of other words and pronounced as a word." AWSPNSTP, however, is pronounced by the geekerati as "awe-spin-step." Really. Would we kid you, hmm..?

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