Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Riak and the demise of Basho

lists.basho.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 102 posts

Re: Riak and the demise of Basho

#31

Post by benwilber0 »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #22

I haven't been following this, but from what I can gather: - They raised $60mil (the last round being a Series G for $25mil!) - They're being sold for what I can only this is a pittance / acquihire by Bet365 - Bet365 is buying them because they're heavily invested in Riak internally - They're open sourcing the code (likely because they need help) I'm not trying to disparage anyone here, but this makes my blood run co…

> Is Riak so critical to Bet365 that the right move was to _buy the company_ versus switching to a different storage system?

Quite possibly, yes. Data has incredible inertia. Not only because of the storage system used, but also all of the years of ops tooling, application integration, etc. that surrounds it. I don't know anything about Bet 365, but if they had any non-trivial amount of their business data locked up in Riak then from a cost/risk analysis they may have decided that purchasing the company was the safest and cheapest option to protect their own company.

Re: Riak and the demise of Basho

#32

Post by ulkesh »

This really doesn't surprise me. My experience with Riak (admittedly in 2012-2014) was that it did not live up to the hype. As strictly a key-value store, it wasn't bad, but toss in 2i, etc, and it quickly became problematic.

Open sourcing the software will surely be a good thing, though. I'm eager to see where it leads.

Re: Riak and the demise of Basho

#33

Post by adityapatadia »

I evaluated it in early 2011. At that time all NoSQL dbs were new in market.

For me, their restriction on usage in cluster mode, very less support for all languages and lack of file storing abilities like GridFS of Mongo made it unattractive.

Eventually Mongo seemed good choice because it was completely free for any kind of use with amazing features and lots of libraries. I am glad I made that decision :)

Re: Riak and the demise of Basho

#34

Post by joaodlf »

I have no experience with Riak, but I once went to a conference (a very short while ago) and saw a presentation by a higher up of Basho (I won't disrespect the person by naming them), in short: It was a very generic, bland and positively abstract presentation about big data. Other presentations were highly technical, so I was excited to get to know Basho as well - I came out of that thinking "wtf was this guy talking about?". It's obviously not a reflection of what Basho stood for, or even what the individual in question stood for, but that's the only memory Basho has left in me.

Re: Riak and the demise of Basho

#35

Post by jchrisa »

cies wrote: post #26
_asummers wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RethinkDB was good from a distributed systems perspective, but a nightmare to maintain in production. Backups and restores would take 12+ hours on ten gigabytes or so and slow queries would grind the whole system to a halt, which isn't possible in Erlang based systems like Riak due to the preemptive scheduling of the BEAM.

Riak builds on theoretical foundation, laid out in Amazon's Dynamo paper. The other NoSQLs did not have this theoretical underpinning, and so they just offer a "best effort".

Dynamo is not exactly a performant or efficient model. It's the equivalent of pulling all the distributed systems guts out and handing them to the user to deal with. And the resulting toll is quantifiable: http://damienkatz.net/2013/05/dynamo_sure_works_hard.html

Re: Riak and the demise of Basho

#36

Post by icedchai »

fapjacks wrote: post #30
hanikesn wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not an acquihire. A lot of developers were already let go quite some time ago from Basho.

Then what was it? Genuinely curious what happened here...

From that post, it sounds like an asset acquisition. In other words, they bought IP: source code and any related rights.

Re: Riak and the demise of Basho

#37

Post by exbet »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #22

I haven't been following this, but from what I can gather: - They raised $60mil (the last round being a Series G for $25mil!) - They're being sold for what I can only this is a pittance / acquihire by Bet365 - Bet365 is buying them because they're heavily invested in Riak internally - They're open sourcing the code (likely because they need help) I'm not trying to disparage anyone here, but this makes my blood run co…

> They're open sourcing the code (likely because they need help)

Unlikely. I genuinely believe Martin Davies is doing it as a service to the Erlang community. bet365 doesn't need to open source anything. They've got deep enough pockets to hire developers to maintain Riak internally for the foreseeable future.

> Is Riak so critical to Bet365 that the right move was to _buy the company_ versus switching to a different storage system?

Yes. There isn't a storage system readily available which offers the same capabilities as Riak. At the scale at which bet365 operates, doing so in a gradual fashion takes years. By capabilities I mean the ability to make different tradeoffs in different use cases. Riak has a nice set of levers to tradeoff consistency for availability. Its built in support for CRDTs is quite amazing.

Re: Riak and the demise of Basho

#38

Post by exbet »

andrew_deane_ wrote: post #17

Today bet365 have signed the agreement to purchase all Basho IP. We expect the agreement to be ratified in the US courts next week. Once cleared, our intention is to open source all code, help rebuild the community and collaboratively take the development of RIAK forward. In the coming weeks we will hopefully answer the questions people have and will be calling on the community to help forge the initial RIAK Roadmap.…

Would make sense to use the same license as Erlang - Apache2

Re: Riak and the demise of Basho

#39

Post by macintux »

joaodlf wrote: post #34

I have no experience with Riak, but I once went to a conference (a very short while ago) and saw a presentation by a higher up of Basho (I won't disrespect the person by naming them), in short: It was a very generic, bland and positively abstract presentation about big data. Other presentations were highly technical, so I was excited to get to know Basho as well - I came out of that thinking "wtf was this guy talking…

A shame you were left with that impression. For quite some time, from top to bottom, Basho had quite a reputation for solid technical talks. The distributed systems conference RICON was quite excellent.

(Disclaimer: former Basho technical evangelist & engineer.)

Suggestion for something much more meaty: https://youtu.be/3SWSw3mKApM

Re: Riak and the demise of Basho

#40

Post by lmm »

cies wrote: post #26
_asummers wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RethinkDB was good from a distributed systems perspective, but a nightmare to maintain in production. Backups and restores would take 12+ hours on ten gigabytes or so and slow queries would grind the whole system to a halt, which isn't possible in Erlang based systems like Riak due to the preemptive scheduling of the BEAM.

Riak builds on theoretical foundation, laid out in Amazon's Dynamo paper. The other NoSQLs did not have this theoretical underpinning, and so they just offer a "best effort".

Cassandra was based on the same thing, no? In my experience Cassandra has been what's beaten Riak.
Post reply on HN