Distributed key-value stores (such as TiKV, Cassandra, CockroachDB storage nodes, and etcd) form the foundational substrate upon which modern internet-scale data infrastructure is built.
Designing a robust distributed KV store requires unifying deep hardware reality and distributed systems theory:
- Single-Node Storage Engine: How to maximize sequential NVMe write throughput and minimize read amplification using Log-Structured Merge-Trees (LSM).
- Consensus & State Machine Replication: How to ensure linearizable consistency and survive network partitions across nodes using Raft consensus.
- Horizontal Elasticity: How to distribute partitions across an elastic cluster of nodes using consistent hashing with virtual nodes.
This Capstone project synthesizes the core algorithms of storage engineering and distributed consensus into a comprehensive, production-grade architectural specification.