// the find
geohot/minikeyvalue
A distributed key value store in under 1000 lines. Used in production at comma.ai
A distributed key-value store built on nginx for blob storage and LevelDB for indexing, aimed at people storing large binary objects (1MB-1GB) across machines who don't want a full distributed filesystem. It's what comma.ai runs in production, so it's been through real-world use, not just a toy.
The design is genuinely minimal - HTTP PUT/GET/DELETE that 302-redirects to nginx volume servers means the volume server itself is just stock nginx, no custom binary protocol to maintain. The on-disk format is plain files plus LevelDB, so if the code has bugs your data isn't locked in some proprietary format - rebuild reconstructs the index from disk. It ships rebalance and rebuild as first-class CLI subcommands, which is the part distributed stores usually punt on.
Last pushed February 2024 and the whole project is one person's ~1000 lines, so there's no bus factor and no guarantee of a fix if something breaks. Rebalancing requires shutting down the master since LevelDB only allows one process, meaning no online resharding - that's a real operational cost at scale. Replication is naive (just N copies via -replicas), there's no consistency model discussion, no Raft/Paxos, so split-brain and write conflicts during partition are on you to reason about. S3 compatibility is explicitly 'a subset,' so don't assume your existing S3 tooling will just work.