This is great news! I've spent the last two years working with Riak. I love its admin tools, and Basho engineers were the best to work with. I'm glad to see Riak live on.
Riak and the demise of Basho
81–90 of 102 posts
Re: Riak and the demise of Basho
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I received a call from a SDB support team member informing me that we either needed to move off their platform by Christmas Day or they'd have to shut us off Wat?! That's an excellent reason to burn fields and salt them.
I was / am pretty sympathetic to their situation. At that point, SDB was already deprecated in favor of dynamo, and they had been asking us to move off of SDB for over a year (before I had joined the company via acquisition). If someone ever does an oral history of AWS, I'm sure that SDB would be the "grand mistake" they made in their first few years. It was never ready for prime time in the way it needed to be.
They still advertise it https://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/ :
> Amazon SimpleDB is designed to integrate easily with other AWS services such as Amazon S3 and EC2, providing the infrastructure for creating web-scale applications.
If I hadn't heard your story, I wouldn't see anything there to steer me away from it.
Re: Riak and the demise of Basho
#83I 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…
How much does it cost to move to Postgres? How much does it cost to buy the assets? How much of a halo do you get from writing a nice post about moving to Postgres? How much of a halo do you get from buying and open sourcing something cool?
I doubt Postgres could handle what Riak's doing. Riak is a Dynamo style database, which basically means that you get zero features but you get something that's fast and scalable. Postgres gives a different set of tradeoffs.
Re: Riak and the demise of Basho
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was / am pretty sympathetic to their situation. At that point, SDB was already deprecated in favor of dynamo, and they had been asking us to move off of SDB for over a year (before I had joined the company via acquisition). If someone ever does an oral history of AWS, I'm sure that SDB would be the "grand mistake" they made in their first few years. It was never ready for prime time in the way it needed to be.
They still advertise it https://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/ : > Amazon SimpleDB is designed to integrate easily with other AWS services such as Amazon S3 and EC2, providing the infrastructure for creating web-scale applications. If I hadn't heard your story, I wouldn't see anything there to steer me away from it.
It's not listed in the AWS console anywhere.
That's enough to scare most users off I imagine.
Re: Riak and the demise of Basho
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seconded on Apache-2.0 - it's what we use. GPL is not attractive to enterprise and will limit the adoption of the tech.
Anecdotally, those who decide to use GPL don't like the results - users are afraid to extend functionality, and conscientious extenders provide code that specific to their use-case and that can't be used.
I think the GPL worked brilliantly for forcing companies to e.g. contribute gcc ports to the commons.
But that doesn't mean it would work for most projects.
Re: Riak and the demise of Basho
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please don't do GPL – It's a no-go and too restrictive for a lot of organizations. Apache 2 or MIT would be the most permissive.
If your organization uses any of: Linux, Android, emacs, gcc or any GNU utility, OpenJDK, or MongoDB, then GPL is clearly not a no-go. GPL only poses issues when the product is a library. For standalone products or ones with linking/access exceptions like OpenJDK, GPL poses no issues, and organizations aren't afraid to use it, especially when they don't intend to modify it. GPL is a great license that ensures that im…
That's a valid point, GPL is especially scary for libraries, less so with server software. Maybe I was a bit hyperbolic. :)
Re: Riak and the demise of Basho
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please don't do GPL – It's a no-go and too restrictive for a lot of organizations. Apache 2 or MIT would be the most permissive.
You mean its a no go for a company to go away with the work of others without giving credit beside naming? Strange world we are living in ...
GPLv3 is for a lot of companies too aggressive on requirements around patent defense, etc. Though many were never fond of the copy-left nature of GPLv2(and 1), they allowed it. GPLv3 upped the bar, to a degree that many lawyers won't sign off on its use.
Apache 2.0 is the standard for almost every company I've dealt with, with MIT and BSD 3 clause being accepted as well. But Apache 2 seems to make most lawyers happy.
Re: Riak and the demise of Basho
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please don't do GPL – It's a no-go and too restrictive for a lot of organizations. Apache 2 or MIT would be the most permissive.
You mean its a no go for a company to go away with the work of others without giving credit beside naming? Strange world we are living in ...
As I replied below, the distinction between libraries and servers is a good one. I was too extreme in my statement without making that distinction.
For libraries, yes, absolutely, companies should rightly be cautious, because it's relatively easy to expose yourself to legal risk.
Nobody is "going away with the work of others" – the whole point of a license is so contributors decide how others can use their work. What exactly is the issue here?
Re: Riak and the demise of Basho
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
They still advertise it https://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/ : > Amazon SimpleDB is designed to integrate easily with other AWS services such as Amazon S3 and EC2, providing the infrastructure for creating web-scale applications. If I hadn't heard your story, I wouldn't see anything there to steer me away from it.
It's not listed in the AWS console anywhere. That's enough to scare most users off I imagine.
Huh, you're right. They still call it out in the DynamoDB FAQs though (https://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/faqs/):
> While SimpleDB has scaling limitations, it may be a good fit for smaller workloads that require query flexibility.
Re: Riak and the demise of Basho
#90I've no experience w/ Riak what so ever but years ago I was contacted by hh for an open position at Basho. They where looking for field support engineer to a local gaming company. They would hire me and put me directly to client. Maybe i'd have gotten some training on the Riak, but it was never mentioned during the rounds. All interviews where done remotely. Eventually I did say no to the offer. Some time later, even…
I knew a couple of folks in Client Services at Basho, one of whom later moved over to the engineering side. From what he told me, the client services group was a great team to work with and had great management.
Missed edit window, but also definitely trained on the job. Neither one had prior experience with Riak.