Who this book is for

Maintainers

As mentioned in Foreword, the group of people that benefit from this book's value the most by far are the current and future Cuprate maintainers.

Cuprate's system design is documented in this book such that if you were ever to build it again from scratch, you would have an excellent guide on how to do such, and also where improvements could be made.

Practically, what that means for maintainers is that it acts as the reference. During maintenance, it is quite valuable to have a book that contains condensed knowledge on the behavior of components, or how certain code works, or why it was built a certain way.

Contributors

Contributors also have access to the inner-workings of Cuprate via this book, which helps when making larger contributions.

Design decisions and implementation details notated in this book helps answer questions such as:

• Why is it done this way?
• Why can it not be done this way?
• Were other methods attempted?

Cuprate's testing and benchmarking suites, unknown to new contributors, are also documented within this book.

Researchers

This book contains the why, where, and how of the implementation of formal research.

Although it is an informal specification, this book still acts as a more accessible overview of Cuprate compared to examining the codebase itself.

Operators & users

This book is not a practical guide for using Cuprate itself.

For configuration, data collection (also important for researchers), and other practical usage, see Cuprate's user book.

Observers

Anyone curious enough is free to learn the inner-workings of Cuprate via this book, and maybe even contribute someday.