Blog
Insights on building, scaling, and enforcing real-time decisions in modern data-driven systems.
The current discourse around AI is fixated on the "Brain" – Large Language Models (LLMs) and the generative capabilities of agents. But for the enterprise, a brain without a nervous…
In 2025, real-time decisioning shifted from a technical ambition to a business requirement. As streaming, AI, and edge computing matured, organizations were forced to rethink how quickly, consistently, and safely…
In mid-October 2025, a single race condition in the DNS automation layer behind Amazon DynamoDB triggered one of the largest cloud outages in recent memory. Tens of thousands of businesses…
-
7 min read
Comparing Cloud Performance With YCSB
Introduction Last year we published YCSB benchmarks that compared IBM SoftLayer with Amazon Web Services. This generated a lot of…
-
7 min read
How we Test at Volt Active Data
When you evaluate a database to use in your application stack, you usually look at the features, the performance, the…
-
7 min read
Accelerating continuous integration with Docker – an intern’s story
Continuous integration (CI) has become a fundamental process in many software-based companies in recent years. Fortunately, frameworks such as Jenkins…
-
7 min read
An intern’s experience with Volt Active Data Materialized Views
My name is Yiqun Zhang and I worked as a software engineering intern on the SQL core team at Volt…
-
7 min read
Bringing Rack-Aware Topology to Volt Active Data
One of the key tasks during initialization of a Volt Active Data cluster is determining cluster topology. The topology includes…
-
7 min read
Getting around the Transparent Huge Pages trap in Linux
A couple of weeks ago, an interesting issue came up in the field. The symptom was that the resident set…
-
7 min read
NoSQL vs. NewSQL: Choosing the Right Tool
Trying to choose a database to solve a problem (or a whole set of them)? Here’s a quick rundown of…
-
7 min read
FoundationDB’s Lesson: A Fast Key-Value Store is Not Enough
The sale and subsequent closure of FoundationDB cut short something of a grand experiment. FoundationDB, conceived as a Key-Value store,…
-
7 min read
How Docker Simplifies Distributed Systems Development at Volt Active Data
Working on distributed systems is fun, but not easy! As a software engineer at Volt Active Data, a big chunk…
-
7 min read
Simplifying the (complex) Lambda Architecture
The Lambda Architecture defines a robust framework for ingesting streams of fast data while providing efficient real-time and historical analytics.…
-
7 min read
Optimizing Index Performance – A CMU Intern’s Work at Volt Active Data
My name is Yetian Xia. I worked as a software engineering intern at Volt Active Data during the summer, working…
-
7 min read
Best Practices for Index Optimization in Volt Active Data
ndexes provide a classic “space for speed” trade-off. They add to the persistent memory footprint of your application data but…
Let’s Talk
Volt is the real-time decisioning layer for mission-critical systems, ensuring decisions are made and enforced immediately against accurate state, even under sustained load.
If your system cannot tolerate delayed enforcement, inconsistent behavior, or reconciliation after the fact, let’s start a conversation about whether a dedicated decisioning layer makes sense for your architecture.