Riak, An Allegory

I recently gave a lightning talk on Riak and the CAP theory where I tried to express the benefits of Riak's distributed system. The initial idea came from the description of the CAP theorem in the book "Seven Databases in Seven Weeks" (part of the pragmatic programming series).

Here's the video.

AutoBenching Capacity

When you are building a service it's important to know early on what kind of performance and scalability you can expect to achieve. However. measuring this isn't an easy task and there are lots of variables to take into account - the hardware, the bandwidth, the disparity between production and development platforms, logging while in development, etc.

I've been working on a new project recently using a strict platform model -- interaction between the various pieces is all via restful http services only (so nothing except the api has access to the underlying datastores etc). This means that we should be able to scale out horizontally very easily by throwing some load balancers between the various layers and that we should be able to test each of the interaction layers with a http load testing tool to get some idea of our capacity and performance under load.

Fun with Riak

I started work on a new project recently and we needed a key value store to store some quotes. We don't know how many quotes up front (less than a billion, more than 10 million). We wanted a key value store that would be resilient, easy to expand, and perform well.... I can't think of a better store for us than Riak.

So what is riak and why is it awesome?