[1] The service is a NoSQL system that address the scalability, availability, and latency needs of the conglomerate's websites.
Sherpa has abilities such as elastic growth, multi-tenancy, global footprint for local low-latency access, asynchronous replication, representational state transfer (REST) based web service APIs, novel per-record consistency knobs, high availability, compression, secondary indexes, and record-level replication.
A software routing layer keeps track of mapping between applications tablets and storage units.
Applications send requests to the router, which forwards them to the correct storage unit based on the tablet map.
Data is organized in tables where primary key uniqueness can be enforced, but other than that, there are no fixed schemas.
The system scales horizontally as newer machines are added, with no downtime to applications.
The Backup feature allows multiple old copies of the full table to be saved in offline storage.