OpenTab is a distributed systems design project for a scalable tablature creation and sharing platform. It models a system where users can create, edit, view, and interact with guitar tabs while supporting live collaboration, commenting, voting, and versioning.
The focus of this project is the architecture, not a production-ready implementation. OpenTab is structured as a skeleton system that demonstrates how such a platform could operate at scale. The design separates read-heavy traffic from critical write operations, incorporates a cache-first strategy for fast retrieval, and uses a Dynamo-inspired distributed data store for durability and availability.
Key ideas include:
- Separation of read and write pipelines
- Cache-optimized GET requests
- Direct-to-database write propagation
- Versioned document storage
- Redundant node replication and leader election
- Gossip-based liveness detection
- Eventual consistency with logical clock coordination
- Live edit propagation without overloading the database
The system is designed to address core distributed systems challenges such as fault tolerance, partition tolerance, high availability, and low latency.
OpenTab serves as an architectural blueprint for how a large-scale collaborative tablature platform could be built, emphasizing distributed storage, message flow design, and scalability tradeoffs rather than a fully implemented production system.