Tradeoffs

Layer makes a set of design tradeoffs we believe improve functionality of your search system. This page makes those tradeoffs explicit. As this list grows, we will offer configuration where possible to allow users to configure their preference.

Layer adds latency to the query path in the following ways.

• An additional network hop (not configurable).
• A query plan that allows for stable reads during heavy writes (index configurable).
• The same query plan also checks RBAC entitlements on every request (not configurable).

On a turbopuffer-backed namespace, Layer also increases index storage requirements via.

• A secondary indexing for filtering by upsert time (not configurable).
• A secondary indexing used for scatter gather sharding (not configurable).