WaveKV

WaveKV is an embeddable Rust library for building distributed key-value stores. It focuses on simplicity over completeness.

Key characteristics:

• Peer-to-peer architecture: All nodes have equal roles. No leader, no coordinator, no special node types.
• No minimum cluster size: Works with a single node or any number of nodes. Scale freely without reconfiguration.
• Last-write-wins conflict resolution: Conflicts are resolved automatically based on (timestamp, origin node id). Simple and deterministic.
• Eventually consistent: Log-driven replication ensures all nodes converge to the same state. No transactions or quorum reads/writes.
• Embeddable library: Not a standalone application. Designed to be embedded into your Rust programs.
• Core only: Provides the replication algorithm and state management. Network transport is left to the application layer.
• In-memory storage: Keeps all data in memory. Best suited for small to medium datasets that fit in RAM.

What it actually does

• Single Source of Truth: Every mutation becomes a StateOp and is appended to a write-ahead log (WAL). Recovery replays the exact same ops.
• Simple Core State: CoreState only tracks three things—KV data, peer metadata (logs + ack progress), and next_seq.
• Eventual Sync: Nodes exchange incremental logs plus snapshots when peers fall behind. A background loop keeps trying until it works.
• Auto Discovery: Incoming sync traffic automatically registers the sender as a peer, so a new node can simply point at any existing node and learn about the rest.

Limitations and Non-goals

WaveKV intentionally does NOT provide:

• Strong consistency or linearizability: Only eventual consistency with last-writer-wins based on (timestamp, origin node id).
• ACID transactions or CAS: No transactional isolation, no compare-and-swap operations.
• Authentication or access control: No built-in security mechanisms.
• Production-grade durability: WAL preallocates and fsyncs, but there are no comprehensive checkpoints beyond the snapshot files used by the demo scripts.
• Network protocol implementation: Transport layer is the application's responsibility.
• Large dataset support: In-memory design limits data size to available RAM.
• Query language or secondary indexes: Simple key-value interface only.
• Encryption: No encryption at rest or in transit.
• Multi-datacenter replication: Not optimized for wide-area network scenarios.
• Performance optimization: Simplicity is prioritized over raw performance.

Debug helpers (optional)

There is a filesync binary under src/bin/ that mirrors a local directory into WaveKV. It exists to exercise the replication path on a laptop. Typical workflow:

cargo build --release --bin filesync
./scripts/test-cluster.sh   # launches three demo nodes inside tmux
./scripts/test-ops.sh       # generates local file churn

The scripts configure a minimal chain of --peers flags so you can watch nodes auto-discover each other via the shared KV store. Feel free to ignore this section if you only care about the embedded library.

License

Apache License Version 2.0 – see LICENSE for full text.