ScyllaDB Engineering: What's New, What's Next by Yaniv Kaul
Join ScyllaDB VP of R & D Yaniv Kaul as he highlights the engineering milestones achieved over the past year, diving into new features, performance improvements, and innovations. Plus, get an exclusive sneak peek into what's coming next for ScyllaDB and the future of high-performance databases.
Yaniv Kaul
■ ScyllaDB’sVP R&D in the last 3 years
■ Previously, managed the development of multiple
storage, virtualization and cloud products at Red Hat
as well as lead the cross engineering performance
group.
3.
■ New featuresof ScyllaDB 2025.x
■ A glimpse into MORE new features of ScyllaDB 2025.x
■ New features of ScyllaDB Cloud
■ A glimpse at 2026 and beyond
Presentation Agenda
4.
Tablets - thenew data layout standard
Vector Search
Disk and Network Compression
Raft-based features
New features of ScyllaDB 2025 releases
Tablets - areal game changer
It’s not very often that we change a core architecture!
Tablets are a completely new way of distributing data.
Tablets provide:
■ Unprecedented elasticity
■ Ability to use the disks up to 90% utilization
■ In 2026: workload based resource balancing,
incremental repair and more
TCO
7.
Tablets - whatare they?
■ A new way of keeping the token range mapping for
a set of replicas of a table’s data.
■ Stored in system.tablets
■ Configured per keyspace, with additional per table configuration options
■ Tablets go through split and merge, in order to keep their sizes in range
■ Compaction, repair, backup tasks are all tablets aware
■ All ScyllaDB drivers are tablets aware. Backwards compatible with others
■ Streaming is file based - orders of magnitude faster, hardly consumes CPU
■ Cleanup is now a simple file deletion
25%
Table A
Table B
Table C
40%
35%
8.
Tablets for amazinglyfast elasticity
■ Parallel bootstrap/scaling of nodes
■ Parallel decommission in 2026.1
■ File-based streaming is (too*) fast!
■ No cleanup of un-owned needed!
■ Support different instance sizes in the same cluster
■ No resharding needed!
■ CQL and Alternator access is available right away
■ We still use heat-weighted-load-balancing
* it’s so fast, we limit it to 75% of base instance network speed
Scaling a cluster
now takes
minutes,
not hours or days!
9.
Tablets provide improveddisk utilization
■ Thanks to fast elasticity and size based load
balancing (2026.1 feature), we can keep disk
utilization to maximum.
■ In ScyllaDB X Cloud, we allow up 90% disk utilization
BEFORE scaling out the cluster
■ New nodes join the cluster in minutes
■ Scaling with small instance size increments
■ Availability zones scale individually
■ Out of space prevention for edge cases
Vector Search aspart of ScyllaDB Cloud
■ AI use cases:
■ Feature store
■ Time series
■ Vector Search (similarity)
■ Generally available in ScyllaDB
Cloud with 2025.4
■ Filtering, quantization and
instance resizing - 2026.1
TCO
12.
4 Simple steps
■Create the table - with vector
■ Insert some data - with embedding
■ Create the vector index
■ Query!
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS myapp.comments (
record_id timeuuid,
id uuid,
commenter text,
comment text,
comment_vector vector<float, 64>,
created_at timestamp,
PRIMARY KEY (id, created_at)
);
INSERT INTO myapp.comments (
record_id,
id,
commenter,
comment,
comment_vector,
created_at
) VALUES (
now(),
uuid(),
'Alice',
'I like vector search in ScyllaDB.',
[0.12, 0.34, 0.56, 0.78, 0.91, 0.15, 0.62, 0.48,
0.22, 0.31, 0.40, 0.67, 0.53, 0.84, 0.19, 0.72,
0.63, 0.54, 0.26, 0.33, 0.11, 0.09, 0.27, 0.41,
0.69, 0.82, 0.57, 0.38, 0.71, 0.46, 0.55, 0.64,
0.17, 0.81, 0.23, 0.95, 0.66, 0.35, 0.44, 0.59,
0.02, 0.75, 0.28, 0.16, 0.92, 0.88, 0.47, 0.13,
0.99, 0.21, 0.32, 0.83, 0.45, 0.04, 0.86, 0.25,
0.36, 0.73, 0.07, 0.61, 0.52, 0.14, 0.68, 0.05],
toTimestamp(now())
);
CREATE CUSTOM INDEX IF NOT EXISTS ann_idx
ON myapp.comments(comment_vector)
USING 'vector_index'
WITH OPTIONS = { 'similarity_function': 'DOT_PRODUCT' };
SELECT id, commenter, comment, created_at
FROM myapp.comments
ORDER BY comment_vector ANN OF [ 0.11, 0.35, 0.56, 0.77, … ]
LIMIT 5;
STEP
04
STEP
03
STEP
02
STEP
01
Embedding
Vector
Index
Node to nodenetwork compression
■ ZSTD or LZ4 - with dictionary
■ Configurable
■ Limited CPU usage
■ Not within rack (AZ)
■ Not for small packets
Data at rest (sstable) compression
■ Default is now LZ4 + dictionary
■ ~20% better than LZ4
■ ZSTD + dictionary is even better!
■ Especially for JSON / text based data
■ Online conversion
Dictionary based advanced compression
lZ4 49%
LZ4
w/dict
44%
ZSTD 34%
ZSTD
w/dict
29%
With Raft, thefollowing are now strongly consistent
■ Schema changes
■ Topology changes (gossip going away in 2026.2!)
■ Authentication (no need to change RF for auth tables manually!)
■ Service levels
■ Tablets location
■ More to come in 2026…
17.
Native object storagebackup/restore
New cloud instances and machine support
Encryption with cloud provider keys
Drivers
More new features of ScyllaDB Enterprise
18.
Native object storage(S3) client within ScyllaDB
C++ based, per shard, part of the streaming I/O scheduling group client:
■ Co-operates, does not compete, with the rest of the workloads
■ FAST - can easily saturate* the network interfaces
■ Supports AWS S3, Google GCS (2026.1), more in the future.
■ ScyllaDB Manager 3.6+ uses it automatically for backup
■ Backup now completes x5 times faster, with negligible impact to the workload
* it’s so fast, we limit it to 75% of base instance network speed
19.
Modern instance typessupport
■ AWS I8g, i8ge - provide 60-70% higher throughput than i4i/i3en
■ AWS I7i, i7ie support - improved disk performance (with 4K blocks)
■ GCP Z3
■ Azure LSv4
■ Oracle image and performance tweaks - 2026.1
■ 512 cores per node - 2026.1
20.
Encryption at rest(EaR) improvements
■ Encryption at rest can now use AWS, GCP or Azure provided keys for
encrypting SSTables.
■ ScyllaDB Cloud now encrypts all new clusters by default - either with
ScyllaDB KMS keys or the customer’s.
21.
New Drivers:
■ RustDriver fully GA
■ Our fastest driver!
■ C++ over Rust
■ Builds on the same Rust code
■ Replaces legacy C++ driver
with full compatibility
■ To be followed with Node JS
over Rust, Python over Rust
■ CDC Rust library
Existing drivers improvements:
■ Native Tablets support
■ Vector type support
■ Performance improvements
■ Removal of legacy protocols
■ Compression to Alternator
requests and responses
(2026.1)
Drivers
22.
X Cloud
Tablets +new instances + Raft based topology + new scaling algorithm
+ flexible billing + parallel boot + fast startup + automation =
Amazing elasticity
23.
Pick the size- 2 steps only
1. Minimum vCPU count
2. Minimum storage size
That’s it.
Vector Search
■ Partof Standard and X Cloud
■ Multiple VS node size options
■ Resize if needed
■ 1 node per Availability Zone
Billing and Metering
■ Contract mapping
■ Flex credits usage
■ Metering improvements
API
■ API support for all operations
■ ScyllaDB Terraform provider to
ease API consumption and
operations
■ Better BYOA integration
■ Bring Your Own Key (BYOK)
More ScyllaDB Cloud improvements
■ Vnodes toTablets online migration
■ STRONG consistency
■ Amazingly fast K-V store
■ More features to reduce TCO, across the board
■ example - tiering to lower cost storage
■ Workload isolation:
■ Isolate hot data from other data, by utilization tablets load balancing
■ Workload based scaling in ScyllaDB Cloud
■ More Real Time AI integrations and features
In the works - major themes
30.
Stay in Touch
YanivKaul
yaniv.kaul@scylladb.com
@YanivKaul
https://github.com/mykaul
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ykaul/
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