Sole owner: Max McCutcheon
MaxMcCutcheon1@outlook.comSpindle
Founded by Max McCutcheon
Durable puts. Readable write path. Crash tests that survive kill -9. The engine is real and MIT on GitHub. Spindle Cloud — managed flat-priced hosting — is the founding roadmap, not a live multi-tenant product yet.
Why teams look at Spindle
Positioning vs hyperscaler KV friction — not a claim that enterprises already rely on Spindle Cloud.
DynamoDB forces RCUs, WCUs, on-demand mode, reserved capacity, and FinOps archaeology. Spindle Cloud’s bet is one flat monthly plan — put, get, scan — if hosted durability ships. Finance forecasts one line. Engineering ships without a capacity committee.
Black-box stores fail opaquely — then your pager wakes a team that can’t read the code. Spindle’s engine is MIT on GitHub now. You can walk the WAL path, the bloom, the compaction. Managed Cloud is the roadmap on top of that audit trail.
Hyperscaler KV traps you in proprietary APIs and region gravity. Embed Spindle’s crate or run on your metal today. Cloud is optional later — same mental model. Leave when you want — the engine comes with you.
Enterprise AWS support is a queue with severity codes. With Spindle you email MaxMcCutcheon1@outlook.com and talk to the person who wrote the fsync policy. That clarity is the support model — not a claim that enterprises already rely on Spindle.
No IAM maze or capacity class bingo to try the engine: clone, cargo test, put/get. Cloud endpoints and Agent GPT mode need a hosted deploy — until then, docs + playground + email Max.
Keys, values, sequences, snapshots. Security and platform teams get DESIGN.md, crash tests, and source — not a PDF that says “trust the region.” That’s the pitch for teams that need explainable KV — not a claim of existing enterprise customers.
vs hyperscaler KV
Big clouds win on endless feature lists. Spindle aims where teams feel pain: billing clarity, portability, and a support path that reaches a human who built the fsync policy. Engine columns below are true today; Cloud columns are goals for a product that is not built.
| — | DynamoDB / peers | Spindle (engine today · Cloud roadmap) |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Usage meters, reserved capacity, surprise bills | OSS free today; Cloud pricing not set (waitlist) |
| Lock-in | Proprietary API + region gravity | MIT engine you can relocate |
| Debuggability | Closed source, opaque failure modes | DESIGN.md + readable Rust path |
| Support | Enterprise ticket maze | Founder on the email thread |
| Onboarding | Console + IAM + capacity classes | Clone + cargo test · Cloud endpoint later |
| Procurement | Commitments, reserved capacity, SKUs | Join the Cloud waitlist — nothing to buy yet |
What is real vs roadmap
WAL, SSTables, compaction, MVCC — implemented, tested, and documented. The serious part of Spindle ships as MIT source today.
If Cloud ships, the aim is one subscription line instead of RU/WU graphs. Until then, self-host the engine at $0.
Managed durability is the company product direction — not a claim that multi-tenant hosting, PITR, or dashboards are live. Embed or self-host now; join the waitlist to hear about Cloud.
Inside the engine
The same LevelDB-shaped core the company publishes — small enough to audit, serious enough to build on. Cloud, when it ships, sits on this path.
BTreeMap with tombstones behind a reader-writer lock. Writers hold it for one insert; deletes never silently vanish under MVCC.
Append before memtable. EveryWrite or group-commit fsync — acknowledged writes survive kill -9.
Block-based tables with sparse index, CRC, footer magic SPNDLSST, and per-table bloom filters.
Background ×10 size ratio. Bounds read amp and file count the LevelDB way.
Min-heap over memtables and SSTables for correct range scans at a snapshot sequence.
Monotonic sequence numbers packed into internal keys. Snapshots ignore newer writes.
Microbenchmarks
From Criterion runs documented in DESIGN.md — not Cloud SLA numbers.
Mem-only put
1.9 µs
Group-commit window, rarely fsyncs
Durable put
238 µs
fdatasync after every WAL append (disk-bound)
Flushed get
8.0 µs
10k keys, one SSTable + bloom
Start with the MIT engine. Talk to the founder about Cloud early access when something matters.