Learn to build highly available, multi-AZ FoundationDB clusters with global ACID transactions. Our expert services simplify deployment, reduce risk, and accelerate your path to a resilient platform.
In a world that runs 24x7, the promise of high availability is a common refrain. But what does that promise really mean when faced with the realities of modern infrastructure? When a cloud provider’s availability zone has an outage, a network partition isolates a data center, or a subtle data consistency bug brings your most critical service to a halt? Traditional databases, often born in a single-server era, can become brittle and complex when forced into today’s distributed world. Failovers are manual and risky, scaling is painful, and developers are often forced to write complex, defensive code to guard against eventual consistency.
For our clients, these aren’t just technical challenges; they are fundamental business risks. That’s why we’ve built our practice around FoundationDB, one of the most powerful and battle-tested distributed databases in the world. But with great power comes great complexity.
Today, we’re going beyond a simple introduction. We will explore the three core features that allow us to build truly unbreakable infrastructure, explain why they matter, and then detail how our specialized services can help you leverage them to gain a decisive competitive edge.
Figure 1. FoundationDB infrastructure pyramid
Feature #1: Unbreakable data integrity with global ACID transactions
What it is: The holy grail of distributed systems is the ability to perform complex operations across dozens of servers as a single, all-or-nothing action. This is precisely what FoundationDB’s global ACID transactions provide. It guarantees that every transaction is atomic, consistent, isolated, and durable, no matter how large or geographically dispersed your cluster is. While many distributed databases force a trade-off between consistency and availability, FoundationDB is architected to deliver both. This is not eventual consistency but true, immediate consistency across your entire dataset.
Why it matters for infrastructure: This single feature helps eliminate entire classes of the most dangerous bugs related to data corruption, race conditions, and inconsistent states. For any platform that requires perfect state management—from financial ledgers and e-commerce inventory systems to infrastructure metadata catalogs—this is not a luxury; it’s a non-negotiable requirement. It means you can build a reliable platform with confidence, knowing the database itself guarantees correctness. This empowers developers to write simpler, more direct business logic, as they no longer have to build complex application-level checks to guard against an unreliable data layer. Without strong consistency at the core, scaling out means scaling out the potential for data errors, which FoundationDB inherently avoids.
Feature #2: Unmatched flexibility with the Layers concept
Figure 2. FoundationDB layered architecture
What it is: FoundationDB itself is a beautifully simple, ordered key-value store. It presents a massively scalable, strictly consistent, and fault-tolerant storage engine. Its immense power comes from Layers—open-source components that run on top to provide different data models. Think of the core database as a universal, highly reliable chassis, and layers as the different bodies you can put on top—for example:
* Document layer: For flexible JSON-style objects, similar to MongoDB.
* Record layer (from Apple): For complex Protobuf schemas, offering relational-like query capabilities.
* Graph layer: For managing highly connected data, similar to Neo4j. Crucially, all these layers run on the same ACID-compliant, fault-tolerant FoundationDB core.
Why it matters for infrastructure: This future-proofs your architecture and dramatically reduces operational overhead and vendor lock-in. Instead of deploying, managing, securing, and monitoring five different database technologies for five different use cases—each with its own operational complexities, backup procedures, and scaling challenges—you manage one unified, resilient foundation. You can offer your internal development teams a simple key-value store today, seamlessly add a full-featured document database for a new microservice tomorrow, and even integrate a graph database for analytics, all running on the same battle-tested core. This provides ultimate data model flexibility and a significantly lower total cost of ownership (TCO) compared to a heterogeneous database environment. It also simplifies compliance and security across your data estate.
Feature #3: Automatic resilience with a distributed-first design
What it is: FoundationDB was explicitly born for the cloud-native era. It is not a single-server database with replication bolted on as an afterthought. It was designed from the ground up to be distributed, meaning every component is inherently aware of the cluster and expects failures to be a normal part of operation. When a server crashes, a network link drops, or a process becomes unreachable, the cluster automatically detects the failure, re-routes traffic to healthy nodes, and self-heals by re-replicating the lost data to other healthy nodes. This all happens without manual intervention.
Why it matters for infrastructure: This is the bedrock of true high availability and resilience. When this distributed-first design is combined with a proper multi-AZ architecture, your platform can survive not just a server crash, but a full data center or entire AZ outage with zero downtime. This powerful, inherent resilience is inherited by every service you build on top of it, forming a robust foundation for your most critical applications. This dramatically reduces the risk of downtime and ensures business continuity in the face of infrastructure volatility.
Architecture overview
Figure 3. FoundationDB multi-AZ deployment
This deployment follows a best-practice architecture for resilience and disaster recovery:
- Primary cluster (DC1): A 9-node cluster spread evenly across three availability zones (e.g., dc1-z1, dc1-z2, dc1-z3). This cluster is configured for triple redundancy, meaning every piece of data has three copies stored on different fault domains. This allows it to automatically survive the loss of any single node or an entire AZ without downtime. It handles all live production traffic.
Figure 4. FoundationDB primary cluster status
- DR cluster (DC2): A 6-node cluster in a separate geographic location, typically spread across two availability zones within that region. This cluster acts as a hot standby. It’s smaller (asymmetric) to optimize costs, accepting that it will still deliver service, though with potentially reduced performance, immediately after a failover.
Figure 5. FoundationDB DR cluster status
How resilient data solutions can help your FoundationDB success
FoundationDB offers the power to build a new generation of unbreakable applications and platforms, but it demands a significant investment in specialized expertise. The path from theoretical benefits to a resilient, production-ready cluster can be complex, time-consuming, and filled with subtle challenges that can derail a project for months. Our team provides the expertise to navigate these complexities, reducing your risk and accelerating your time to market.
Here’s how we partner with you:
- For unbreakable data integrity (global ACID transactions):
Data model & key schema design: We dive deep into your workload patterns to structure your keys and values, avoiding hotspots and minimizing transaction conflicts for optimal performance and efficiency under heavy load.
Core transactional logic development: We partner with your platform team to correctly implement foundational, multistep operations. We define optimal transaction boundaries, understand read/write patterns, and develop robust conflict resolution strategies, ensuring correctness and performance. - For unmatched flexibility (the Layers concept):
Layer evaluation and selection: We help you evaluate the maturity, performance characteristics, and trade-offs of various open-source layers. Based on your long-term platform goals, we guide you in choosing the most appropriate data models.
Layer integration and customization: We handle the deployment and integration of these layers into your existing infrastructure. This includes configuring them for optimal performance and creating a seamless, well-documented experience for your application teams. - For automatic resilience (distributed-first design):
Production-grade architectural blueprint: Our core offering is the design and implementation of a resilient 3-AZ primary cluster with a robust cross-region DR site. We meticulously architect the network, plan node distribution, and configure locality settings for automatic AZ failure handling.
Automated and repeatable deployment: We leverage modern Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools like Terraform and Ansible to build a completely automated, repeatable, and declarative deployment process, ensuring your cluster is built consistently, securely, and reliably every time.
Operational readiness & playbooks: Beyond deployment, we ensure your cluster is fully production-ready by integrating comprehensive monitoring, configuring critical alerting, and developing detailed operational playbooks for graceful failover, disaster recovery, and failback procedures.
By partnering with the Advisory and Professional Services team, you gain the architectural design, deep implementation expertise, and seasoned operational knowledge needed to reduce the risk of your FoundationDB adoption and ensure your critical data infrastructure is truly unbreakable. We’ve navigated the complexities so you don’t have to.
Engage us from start to finish, or wherever you are in your journey.
Figure 6. HPE Services from start to finish of the database journey
Ready to build your database fortress? Learn more about HPE Services.
Meet the author:
Ronnie Arangali, WW Database Lead
Meet Ronnie, a highly skilled database expert with extensive experience in architecting, implementing, and optimizing complex database solutions. Proven ability to mentor and guide teams, fostering a culture of innovation and best practices. Demonstrated success in delivering high performance, scalable, and secure database systems.
Rayaguru Dash, Database Delivery Lead
Meet Rayaguru, a seasoned database expert and consultant at HPE since 2012. With over 18 years of hands-on experience across a spectrum of database technologies, for clients seeking migration, design, and performance tuning solutions. He has empowered numerous clients to optimize their systems, ensuring seamless operations and enhanced efficiency. With a passion for unravelling complexities and a track record of delivering impactful solutions, Rayaguru continues to be a driving force in the realm of database consultancy.
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