Quorum-free replicated state machine built atop S3
Hi HN, I’m sharing the alpha release of S2C, a state machine replication system built atop S3. The goal is to enable a distributed application to maintain consistent state without needing a quorum of nodes for availability or consistency. The idea came from a side project that was using S3 and where I needed strongly consistent distributed state but wanted to avoid adding a separate consensus dependency. I initially tried to use S3 directly for coordination, but it became messy. Eventually, I realized I need a replicated state machine with a deterministic log, and then it ended up as a…
What it does
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hi HN, I’m sharing the alpha release of S2C, a state machine replication system built atop S3. The goal is to enable a distributed application to maintain consistent state without needing a quorum of nodes for availability or consistency. The idea came from a side project that was using S3 and where I needed strongly consistent distributed state but wanted to avoid adding a separate consensus dependency. I initially tried to use S3 directly for coordination, but it became messy. Eventually, I realized I need a replicated state machine with a deterministic log, and then it ended up as a standalone project. To mitigate S3's latency and API costs, it uses time- and size-based batching by default. S2C supports: - Linearizable reads and writes (with single node) - Exactly-once command semantics (for nodes with stable identities) - Dynamic node joins and cold-start recovery from zero nodes - Split-brain safety without clocks or leases - Snapshotting, log truncation, etc. Of course, it trades latency and S3 operation costs for operational simplicity - not meant to replace high-throughput Raft rings. And clearly, only usable in architectures that already use S3 (or compatible with similar guarantees). It has passed chaos/fault-injection tests so far (crashes, partitions, leader kills); formal verification planned. It’s still alpha, but I’d love for people to try it, experiment, and provide feedback. If you’re curious, the code, and an extensive deep dive guide are here: [https://github.com/io-s2c/s2c]
Does the same job
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This is a long-running project that started as the proverbial need to scratch my own itch and then somehow evolved into a full-time job of the past 6 years. Link: https://bvckup2.com I thought I'd do a Show HN for two reasons. 1. I obviously want to show my baby to those who haven't seen it. Its primary purpose is to do very fast file replication. If you are familiar with "robocopy /mir" - same idea, but on steroids. Lots of them. It can be used for both mirroring and archiving backups, among other things. It is light, very small and it is really quite fast. Half of the…
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- PBProtobuf Based Schema Centric Logging Framework2023 · logunify.com · ▲8
Hi HN, have been working on this as a side project, would appreciate any feedback :) LogUnify is built around schemas based on protobuf and all the events in LogUnify are structured. By schematizing events, we offer the following benefits: - Consistency: All the events across all platforms and languages are produced in a uniform way with the generated type-safe SDKs, which ensures data consistency from the root. - Shared Understanding: Event schemas with rich data types and metadata are self-explained, which enables different departments from developers to business stakeholders to share the…
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4 months ago, our announcement for our free, multi-node, petabyte-scale time-series database generated 200+ comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23272992 Many commented on the Timescale License, our source-available license governing advanced features (eg multi-node). Most were positive, but some pointed out drawbacks (who says HN can't be productive!). That spurred an internal debate. Today we're happy to share an updated Timescale License with new rights, including the "right-to-repair" and "right-to-improve." And we’re doubling-down on our community, making all…
- WBWe built a <60ms, open-source alternative to E2B using RustVMM and KVMApr 2026 · github.com · ▲7
Over the past few months, as we scaled our internal AI Agents, we hit a dead end: Running LLM-generated arbitrary code in Docker is basically running naked on security due to container escape risks. But using full traditional VMs takes minutes to boot and eats too much memory to support high-density concurrency. We loved the developer experience of SaaS sandboxes on the market, but they are closed-source, expensive, and have too high a barrier to entry for self-hosting. So, our team decided to build our own. After months of grinding, using RustVMM and KVM, we built a blazing-fast,…
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Hey HN! I wanted to share something I built over the last few weeks: isometric.nyc is a massive isometric pixel art map of NYC, built with nano banana and coding agents. I didn't write a single line of code. Of course no-code doesn't mean no-engineering. This project took a lot more manual labor than I'd hoped! I wrote a deep dive on the workflow and some thoughts about the future of AI coding and creativity: http://cannoneyed.com/projects/isometric-nyc
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