On brewing fresh espresso

Abstract

Espresso is a document-oriented distributed data serving platform that has been built to address LinkedIn's requirements for a scalable, performant, source-of-truth primary store. It provides a hierarchical document model, transactional support for modifications to related documents, real-time secondary indexing, on-the-fly schema evolution and provides a timeline consistent change capture stream. This paper describes the motivation and design principles involved in building Espresso, the data model and capabilities exposed to clients, details of the replication and secondary indexing implementation and presents a set of experimental results that characterize the performance of the system along various dimensions.