This repository is research code and no longer maintained. The students working on it have graduated.

Welcome to Apiary! Apiary is a transactional function-as-a-service (FaaS) framework for building database-oriented applications such as microservices and web service backends. Apiary provides an easy-to-use Java interface that supports general computation and offers excellent performance, strong consistency guarantees, and powerful new observability features such as automatic data provenance capture. Apiary is an ongoing research project within the MIT-Stanford DBOS collaboration; we are interested in any feedback you can provide to improve the project so it better meets developers' needs.

An Apiary application is composed of transactional functions, which are regular Java functions that use SQL to access application state in a backend database, but which execute as ACID database transactions. We provide interfaces to write these functions, compose them into larger programs, then schedule and run them. Apiary provides three exciting features:

• High performance, especially in a distributed setting, through aggressive co-location of compute and data.
• Strong consistency for programs, including exactly-once semantics for program execution and cross-function or even cross-application transactional guarantees.
• Data provenance capture for observability: we automatically record every function execution and every operation performed on data, then store this information in easy-to query database tables to aid in debugging, monitoring, and auditing.

Apiary currently supports two database backends: Postgres and VoltDB. It can export provenance data to two systems: Postgres and Vertica. We are open to supporting more databases in the future.

Getting Started

To get started with Apiary, let's run a demo application: a simple social network built with Apiary and Spring Boot. It requires Docker.

To set up the demo, let's first install some dependencies:

sudo apt install openjdk-11-jdk maven libatomic1

Next, let's compile Apiary. In the Apiary root directory, run:

mvn -DskipTests package

Then, let's start Postgres from a Docker image. We recommend you configure Docker so it can be run by non-root users.

scripts/initialize_postgres_docker.sh

To start the website, run in the postgres-demo root directory:

mvn clean && mvn package && mvn spring-boot:run

Then, navigate to localhost:8081 to view this new social network! You should see its home page.

Next Steps

If you want to learn more, we provide a detailed tutorial showing you how to build the demo social networking application. We also have a programming guide for Apiary as well as documentation.

Other Projects

This repository additionally contains source code for Epoxy (VLDB 23) and R³ (VLDB 23). Detailed information on Epoxy is here. Detailed information on R³ is here.

Contact Us

We're interested in any feedback you have to make this project better. Apiary is primarily developed by Peter Kraft and Qian Li as part of the DBOS project. Contact us via email at:

apiary-group@cs.stanford.edu