Client architecture

This page describes Aerospike’s distributed client-server architecture and the capabilities of the Aerospike client API.

Client library capabilities

The following Aerospike client API capabilities provide high performance and make building with Aerospike simple:

Tracks cluster states
- At any instant, the client uses the info protocol to communicate with the cluster and maintain a list of cluster nodes.
- The Aerospike partitions algorithm determines which node stores a particular data partition.
- Automatically tracks cluster size changes—entirely transparent to the application—to ensure that transactions do not fail during transitions, and applications do not need to restart on node arrival and departure.
Implements connection pooling so you don’t have to code, configure, or manage a pool of connections for the cluster.
Manages transactions, monitors timeouts, and retransmits requests.
Thread safe—only one instance is required in a process.

Figure 1: Aerospike client layer

Besides basic put(), get(), and delete() operations, Aerospike supports the following:

CAS (safe read-modify-write) operations
In-database counters
Batch get() operations
Scan operations
List and Map element operations such as removeByKey() or getByValueRange()
Queries—bin values are indexed and the database searched by equality or range
User-Defined Functions (UDFs) extend database processing by executing application code in Aerospike
Aggregation—Use UDFs on a collection of records to return aggregate values

The Client matrix provides the following client details: