We’ve got some exciting plans cooking in the cauldron over at Hiive Systems, and one of them involves replacing our existing config management system for deployments – a couple of config files separated into always changes and rarely changed parts – with something more scalable, dynamic while still very fast to query and read.

While our back-end is running on MySQL, I’m concerned that there might be a faster way to do things. I’m looking for some insight from people who’ve “been there and done that” already, though, as this is going to be a lot of work to test and check – if someone has already got some experience with this, I’d love to hear it!

I’m looking at LDAP because our configs make use of a hierarchy already, and LDAP has a reputation of being very fast for reads. While writes are slower, this isn’t a very big deal (changing the default pagination or time zone for a deployment/user isn’t likely to be a very frequent thing), yet these configs are going to be hit up many times a second (our app servers are going to be working with a single tree of code that serves a very large number of deployments, and each “view” on the app server might be for a different deployment, database and user).

If you’ve got any suggestions or comments to make, feel free to add them to my question at StackOverflow.