At Thought Machine, when we embarked on our journey of creating Vault Core, we both saw the challenge and recognized the opportunity. We carefully designed a system from the ground up that was able to operate efficiently in a distributed environment without sacrificing correctness or ever shutting the core. To achieve this we understood that it was critical that we both started as and remained an engineering and product focused organisation.

We designed Vault Core to handle high throughput within reasonable latencies, whilst ensuring zero data loss. Finding the right balance between system characteristics is key, as any distributed systems engineer will tell you - it’s a game of trade-offs. Every design decision trades off a number of key system attributes including throughput, latency, availability and durability - the laws of physics tell us we cannot have it all. Vault carefully chooses the right trade-offs in the right places.