Motivation
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Voedger was initially designed by unTill Software Development Group B.V. () in the early 2020s. At that time, unTill was providing a mature "desktop" POS solution (unTill Prime) for the European market and was seeking to develop a cloud version and expand into other markets.
Technical characteristics of unTill Prime:
Over 1 million lines of code (including the "frontend")
RDBMS: Firebird
Database schema: more than 400 tables
Client base: ~15000 POS terminals and 20000 handheld devices.
unTill company management came up with the following initial requirements for the cloud version.
Distributed Data
It shall be possible to create clusters to keep POS data and configuration all over the world.
Performance
Each cluster shall support 10,000 restaurants (230 operations per second, see below).
Federation
Users shall have the ability to store their data across multiple clusters, for example, to manage several restaurants located in different parts of Europe.
Fault Tolerance
If a node or a cluster fails, data shall NOT be lost.
High Availability
If a node or a datacenter fails, clients shall experience downtime of less than 5 minutes. Downtime per month: 22 minutes, 99.95% ("three nines five").
Event Sourcing
System shall be built around the "journal". All changes to the application state shall be stored as a sequence of events.
Consistency
Strict Consistency for commands, Eventual Consistency for queries
Scalability
It shall be possible to scale the system by adding nodes to existing clusters and creating new clusters
Edge Computing
The system will be installable at the "edge" (e.g., in a restaurant) and able to synchronize with the cloud.
Zero Downtime Deployment
It shall be possible to update the application without downtime.
Analyzing the requirements, we identified the Modern Tech Stack:
We could have built our system using components from this stack. It would take man-years to develop and we had agreed to invest these resources, as did our colleagues from other POS providers. However, during the analysis and research process, we got the idea that we could create a "generic engine" that meets the requirements above. This engine would not only enable us to build our POS system but also allow us to bring a new product to the market. This product would enable the development of systems with similar requirements in a significantly shorter time, potentially up to 10 times faster than using just the Modern Tech Stack.
We shared this idea with colleagues from other companies, and they agreed to invest in the development of this engine.
This is how Voedger was born.
As we wanted to go public with Voedger, we needed to add some extra requirements.
Simple Coding
It shall be extremely easy to develop Voedger applications.
Simple Testing
It shall be extremely easy to test Voedger applications.
Cloud Agnostic
It shall be possible to run Voedger everywhere, including on your own infrastructure.
Simple Configuration
It shall be easy to build and operate clusters.
We have designed and built Voedger to meet all these requirements. If your system has similar requirements, Voedger could be the solution for you.
All requirements, their implementation, advantages, and trade-offs will be considered in detail in the following topics.
