Open Riak – open, modern Riak fork

Riak has been maintained through the post-basho years by engineers at some of its larger customers (disclaimer - including myself).

The focus has been on trying to improve the stability of the database when subject to complex failure scenarios under stressful load, with minimal need for urgent operator intervention. The focus has been on keeping those existing operators happy rather than seeking out new users. Evolution of the product since basho has been slow but significant.

The project now has support from Erlang Ecosystem Foundation, and we're looking to invest some effort over the next few months explaining what we've done, and to start to articulate what we see as the future for Riak. So if you're interested watch this space.

It is expected to remain a niche product though. However, it may still find a home for those demanding specific non-functional requirements, with an acceptance of some functional constraints.

This really hits home and makes me happy to see on the HN front page.

Nearly 10 years later and I still consider my time working on Riak at Basho the highlight of my career.

After leaving, my original plan was to found "Basho 2.0" after my non-compete expired. But, unexpected personal/family hardships in 2015-2018 made big-tech money the better choice for awhile, and Cloud/competitors continued to chip away at the market.

Often stil regret not taking that path.

But, happy to see technology I'm very fond of still living on and providing value to the world.

I led a migration from Mongo to Riak at Shareaholic about 12 years ago: https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/migrating-to-riak-at-sh...

It was successful at first, but ultimately we traded one set of problems for another (how novel, I know).

In particular, I underestimated the pain of troubleshooting the database itself. Riak was a new product, we were a small team that had never run anything on BEAM, and ultimately we lost too many days debugging and trying to make sense of Erlang stacktraces.

The Basho folks were great, and to this day I appreciate how quickly they fixed a number of bugs for us. But ultimately it wasn't enough -- we found problems faster than they could be patched.

I've never met an engineering team that used Riak, but it is used heavily as an example technology in Kleppmann's 'Designing Data Intensive Applications'. (I would say, informally, it's usually the example of the "other way" as opposed to other more well-known databases.) This does make me wonder what became of it, why it didn't take off.

Lightning Talk: Introducing OpenRiak - Nicholas Adams: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GLBsBeM4Kc

Basho team was very kind to open source contributions in ~2011-12: I've written an open source Riak client in Dart, and they had sent me t-shirts (the quality ones that are rare today). Nice treats for a fun project :)

Cool! I never used it but really liked the engineers I met who worked at basho on risk. AFAIK, they basically had an engineering dream team until their last ceo had them go hard in certain directions that didn’t pan out.

I used Riak for a project back in 2012, the app that became the Whisper App, and as a huge Erlang fanboy, I was so excited about it.

But it was incredibly unreliable at scale, and my colleague and I spent a week of sleepless nights under incredible personal and business pressure - as the servers got busier and busier - ripping it out.

Still love vector clocks, though, and have fond memories of the Basho team presenting at Erlang Factory

I still use my RICON pint glass and wear my RICON jacket Basho gave everyone at RICON almost every week. My favorite conf swag ever

As someone who has used Riak in anger once in his career and who has a blossoming interest in FoundationDB I'd love someone to contrast the two systems. My knee-jerk reaction --- which I'm calling out as such! --- is that FDB has decreased the relevance of systems like Riak.

For a long time Riak was my favorite key value store. It went into production without any significant issue in several companies and was running without interruption despite the face of hardware issues.

I think it stability was due to the fact of combining great technologies like LevelDB and Erlang. I wish it was a bit more popular.

Who would this be for in 2024?

I remember evaluating Riak back in 2011 or so for an analytics solution, but ended up going with a more traditional OLAP database that was a much better option.

It's hard for me to imagine where Riak would be a good option given how many choices we have today for various data stores.

A question possibly answered elsewhere, but did openriak include only Risk KV, or also other projects like CS & TS?

"mOdERn" (stupidest buzzword ever; for me: modern == stupid NIH rewrite)

It’s actually kinda silly how exciting this is to me

What's a Riak and is there really no better link for this news?

it's always great idea to build your company on software written in some obscure niche language...