Jason Allum on Bedrock
From Elixir Mentor by Jacob Luetzow
May 24, 2026 · 1h 35m · Season 1 · Episode 84
About this episode
Jacob Luetzow interviews Jason Allum about Bedrock, an embedded, distributed key-value store for Elixir, discussing its architecture, functionality, and implications for distributed state consistency.
In this episode of the Elixir Mentor Podcast, I sit down with Jason Allum, creator of Bedrock and Beadwork and a 40-year veteran of computing, to talk about Bedrock: an embedded, distributed key-value store for Elixir with guarantees that go beyond ACID. Jason walks through the problem Bedrock solves, keeping distributed state consistent when the same data is read and written across many nodes. We get into why the BEAM's decades-old ideas map cleanly onto today's AI and agent workloads, how Bedrock borrows its architecture from FoundationDB, and what serializable transactions actually buy you over plain ACID. From there we dig into the machinery: log servers versus storage servers, the five-second version window and MVCC, letting it crash with supervision-tree thinking across a cluster, and how rows can live as values while indexes become keys. Jason also covers running distributed jobs with leases and what it takes to swap Postgres out for Bedrock. Along the way Jason makes the case that none of this is magic, that the real wins come from understanding your machine and the shape of your data. We finish on Beadwork, his lightweight system for managing agent tickets directly in…
People in this episode
Host: Jacob Luetzow
Guest: Jason Allum
Topics covered
- distributed databases
- Elixir
- key-value store
- ACID
- agent workloads
- supervision-tree thinking
Keywords
- Bedrock
- Beadwork
- distributed state
- ACID
- MVCC
- log servers
- storage servers
- Elixir
- agent tickets
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Postgres, FoundationDB
Products: Bedrock, Beadwork
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