Building a Riak Cluster On Brightbox cloud

#1

Post by _russelldb » Wed, Jan 04, 2012, 1:55 PM UTC

Building a Riak Cluster On Brightbox cloud
brightbox.com

Re: Building a Riak Cluster On Brightbox cloud

#2

Post by andrewnez » Wed, Jan 04, 2012, 2:08 PM UTC

Direct link: http://docs.brightbox.com/guides/cli/riak-cluster/

Re: Building a Riak Cluster On Brightbox cloud

#3

Post by tptacek » Wed, Jan 04, 2012, 6:59 PM UTC

Does it make a lot of sense to build a Riak cluster in a virtualized environment?

The clear win for Riak that I can see is being able to easily replicate some of the characteristics of AWS on in-house hardware.

Re: Building a Riak Cluster On Brightbox cloud

#4

Post by siculars » Wed, Jan 04, 2012, 7:23 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #3

Does it make a lot of sense to build a Riak cluster in a virtualized environment? The clear win for Riak that I can see is being able to easily replicate some of the characteristics of AWS on in-house hardware.

AFAIK, the official stance from Basho is to not use a virtual environment. That said, Joyent does officially support Riak in their environment. The thing to look out for is not slow i/o but variable, unpredictable i/o which is what you get with virtual machines... unless they are your virtual machines in a private cloud.

Re: Building a Riak Cluster On Brightbox cloud

#5

Post by siculars » Wed, Jan 04, 2012, 7:32 PM UTC

Very good writeup. This specifically covers setting up the firewall rules to only allow inter-group communication. This is very important to understand when working with a Riak cluster because Riak itself has very little to no internal security mechanics. You must proxy Riak through some middleware or somesuch for any real world usage.

Something to keep in mind is the multi-zone/geographic clustering. Brightbox specifically mentions they have a low latency link between their zones. I would test throughly. Riak is built on Erlang, which at its core is a message passing language. Riak by extension is very sensitive to the speed, throughput and latency by which those messages are passed amongst its members. Again, test throughly, YMMV.