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Riak and the demise of Basho

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Re: Riak and the demise of Basho

#61

Post by nerpderp83 »

benwilber0 wrote: post #31
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…

I thought data had gravity.

Re: Riak and the demise of Basho

#62

Post by wlesieutre »

rasjani wrote: post #45

I'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.

Re: Riak and the demise of Basho

#63

Post by nerpderp83 »

macintux wrote: post #39
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

I suggest going through all the RICON talks, https://www.youtube.com/user/BashoTechnologies/playlists

This talk on LVars by Lindsey Kuper blew my mind https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dFO5Ir0xqY

Re: Riak and the demise of Basho

#64

Post by wlesieutre »

nerpderp83 wrote: post #61
benwilber0 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I thought data had gravity.

For those not in on the joke, "Data Gravity" is a concept proposed by Basho's former CTO: https://datagravity.org/

Re: Riak and the demise of Basho

#65

Post by pron »

atonse wrote: post #48
kuwze wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPLv3 and Apachev2 are the best in regards to dealing with patents.

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 improvements to the product are shared back with the community. In fact, for a database like Riak, Affero GPL, like the MongoDB license may even be better, as organizations that make improvements to Riak but don't redistribute it but run it internally on their servers would also be required to contribute back their modifications.

Re: Riak and the demise of Basho

#66

Post by macintux »

nerpderp83 wrote: post #63
macintux wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I suggest going through all the RICON talks, https://www.youtube.com/user/BashoTechnologies/playlists This talk on LVars by Lindsey Kuper blew my mind https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dFO5Ir0xqY

Lindsey rocks. She had a recent blog post hit HN.

There's a fair number of RICON videos on Vimeo too. One of my all-time favorites from Joe Hellerstein: https://vimeo.com/53904989

Re: Riak and the demise of Basho

#67

Post by flurdy »

cies wrote: post #10
arianvanp wrote: post #4

Seems like a good fit. Bet365 is deeply embedded into the Erlang community.

Here a link to their Github: https://github.com/bet365 Not too much Open Source code released by them. Mainly some forks and two RPC libs.

That is only one avenue to open source contributions. They may contribute via individual commits directly to other libraries such as https://github.com/basho/riak etc

Re: Riak and the demise of Basho

#68

Post by menacingly »

lmm wrote: post #40
cies wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If I remember correctly, Cassandra is actually an ideological frankenstein from pieces of BigTable & Dynamo

EDIT: I don't mean to disparage it, just that it doesn't come as purely from one direction as Riak. It certainly appears to have won

Re: Riak and the demise of Basho

#69

Post by kstrauser »

wjossey wrote: post #59

In 2012, I worked on a nine month project to migrate a fairly large hot dataset (10s of TBs) off of SimpleDB and onto Riak. At the time, we were experiencing tens of hours of downtime a quarter, much of which could be attributed to SDB. My favorite story about that migration is that four months into the project, we were moving along nicely and ready to start cutting over to Riak after the Christmas holiday. My office…

> 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.

Re: Riak and the demise of Basho

#70

Post by menacingly »

In my experience with Riak, it absolutely lived up to its promise of scale, even if single-request speed was never quite as zippy as anyone would have liked.

However, the Dynamo design is just borderline unpalatable from a developer's perspective. I enjoy being aware of exactly the trade-offs being made, and Basho was always really open about it, but I don't blame anyone for not wanting to dig deep in the weeds to make it work for fairly common use cases.

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