The blog that started it all...

Gun is a persisted distributed cache, part of a NoDB movement. It requires zero maintenance and runs on your own infrastructure. Think of it as "Dropbox for Databases" or a "Self-hosted Firebase". This is an early preview, so check out the github and read on.

Everything gets cached, so your users experience lightning fast response times. Since gun can be embedded anywhere javascript can run, that cache can optionally be right inside your user's browser using localstorage fallbacks. Updates are then pushed up to the servers when the network is available.

All conflict resolution happens locally in each peer using a deterministic algorithm. Such that eventual consistency is guaranteed across all writes within the mesh, with fault tolerant retries built in at each step for at least once deliveries. Data integrity is now a breeze.

Gun also establishes and repairs server to server communication across geographically separated machines, with just the help of an initial IP from you. It bridges the distance with a realtime connection, so updates propagate at the speed of the raw pipes linking them. However each server is intelligent enough to only subscribe to the necessary subsection of your data set that is in its working memory, keeping things nimble for its connected users.

Data is then persisted to any S3 like service, allowing you to save a truly webscale amount of "big data" without breaking your wallet. Consistency across concurrency is achieved at this layer by each parallel snapshot going through an idempotent transformation that is agreed upon. The granularity and frequency of these snapshots can be tweaked by you, easily tailor fitting it to your data needs and budget concerns.

In summary, this marks an important progression in web technologies. Memory is getting cheap enough that we can now front load each connected user's active data right into the application layer and manipulate it directly. Networks are fast enough that if we get too many connected users we can just horizontally redistribute them across different machines. Conflict resolution algorithms are sophisticated enough to handle things immediately in the majority of data cases, with the remaining few as transactions performed ontop.

This is will be a win for both developers and users, because it makes things easier to build and faster to respond. We are excited about this and working hard to finish the first release.

If you would like to learn more, email hi@gunDB.io - or join the Google Group. Plus we're hiring, so contact us!

FAQ

Why did you build this thing?

1. I love databases, especially new ones that keep the working set in memory. But I was horrified to realize that if I use a Database as a Service (DaaS) then I would have to rely on a network call to get that data, which is horribly slow. I wanted something faster, and if possible, cheaper - because they start charging you outrageous prices if you get past their incredibly tiny free tier.

2. Hosting your own database is a pain because you have to maintain the hard drives. Even the basic setup and configuration is nasty... having to create a bunch of EBS volumes, attaching them, then mounting, formatting, MDADM and LVM, striping, mirroring, and keeping fstab from locking on boot. This is ignoring having to figure out how to resize them. Even with SSDs you have problems that they are bound to one instance and you get charged for the total volume size, not the amount used.

I wanted something easy, needing no maintenance and be extremely portable - allowing me to spin up an ephemeral server anywhere, on any cloud, and my data "just work" there.

How are you different from every other database that is trying to reinvent the wheel?

1. Because gun is not a database (NoDB), it is a persisted distributed cache. The fatal flaw with databases is that they assume some centralized authority. While this may be the case initially when you are small, it always ceases to be true when you become large enough that concurrency is unavoidable. No amount of leader election and consensus algorithms can patch this without facing an unjustified amount of complexity. Gun resolves all this by biting the bullet - it solves the hard problems first, not last. It gets data synchronization and conflict resolution right from the beginning, so it never has to rely on vulnerable leader election or consensus locking.

2. Plus it embeds directly into your application, so you can do your own custom queries with just pure programming logic. Meaning you never have to learn some silly separate query language again. A query language which just attempts to be some DSL to RPC another machine into doing the same query you could have already written in half the time it took to learn the query language. Because face it, any sufficiently capable query language has to be Turing complete, and at that point - why aren't you just writing your entire application logic in it? Your app is nothing without your data.