Basho Unveils New Cloud Storage Software: Riak CS

by tsantero • 14 years ago

89 27 14 years ago

chaostheory3• 14 years ago

This company has some great open products. Too bad what they ask for in yearly support subscription fees, feels too much.

meepmorp• 14 years ago

By subscription feed, do you mean support for the enterprise product or for this new offering? I didn't see numbers for either on the website - can you ballpark what they are?

And is your problem with the quantity of dollars, or with the fact that they charge at all?

chaostheory3• 14 years ago

> By subscription feed, do you mean support for the enterprise product or for this new offering? I

Yes

> And is your problem with the quantity of dollars, or with the fact that they charge at all?

Quantity, in particular how much they charge per server. I don't think it would be fair for basho for me to spout specifics, but as late of last year it seemed rather exorbitant especially for an open source product.

This is the main reason my large employer didn't even bother to seriously look at what their products had to offer. Both 10gen (Mongodb) and one of the companies offering Cassandra support contracts were a lot more reasonable.

robterrell• 14 years ago

Basho has a "Riak Enterprise for Startups" which they describe as a "pay what you can" service for self-funded or angel-funded companies. I don't know what price they quoted you (would be interested to know) but it seems like you could pay whatever you felt it was worth until your first round closes.

hkarthik• 14 years ago

Basho's products look great, but I hardly hear of anyone using them. Most folks in the Ruby community tend gravitate towards MySQL, MongoDB, and Postgres. Any insight as to why that is? Riak looks like a pretty solid database too.

nl• 14 years ago

Riak's sweet spot is with data sizes quite a lot larger than the typical RoR app.

Riak has a tunable consistency model, and there are a lot less applications that need tunable consistency compared with those that need the strengths of the SQL databases (everyone knows them, they just work) or MongoDB (designed from the ground up to be a developer friendly document database).

The closest Riak competitor is probably Cassandra (in terms of technical attributes), and you don't see huge numbers of Ruby apps using Cassandra either.

http://wiki.basho.com/Riak-Comparisons.html is worth reading.

benmccann• 14 years ago

The comparison seems pretty outdated. From the page: "Cassandra 0.6, currently in beta". The latest version of Cassandra is 1.0.8.

bonzoesc2• 14 years ago

(Disclosure: I'm a Developer Advocate employed by Basho)

Postgres is a better fit for most Ruby web applications. When you first launch your app, you'll have a tiny handful of users and won't have any problems fitting it in a free Heroku instance on the free 5MB shared Postgres, and the compromises you'd have to make with your data model to fit a database like Riak aren't going to pay off until you get enormous. Postgres and ActiveRecord get the job done quickly and without fuss, and allow you to launch quickly and see how your app is received.

You can always scale later: https://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch04_Scale_Later.php

MartinMond• 14 years ago

RiakCS looks interesting, is it/will it be open source?

tlack• 14 years ago

He is right in that you don't hear much about Riak success stories, even though from the word on the street it's a good product. Perhaps this is something you guys could focus on putting together?

myronmarston• 14 years ago

At SEOmoz, we use riak for our rankings collection service, which is written using sinatra and resque. We blogged about, in case you're interested:

http://devblog.seomoz.org/2011/10/using-riak-for-ranking-col...

I know of a couple other ruby shops that use riak. Github uses it a bit. Spreedly uses it as well.

technomancy• 14 years ago

From what I hear, MongoDB rescue missions actually constitute a fairly significant portion of Basho's consulting contracts.

cagenut• 14 years ago

Thats interesting considering they killed off the luwak plugin a few months ago.

nosequel• 14 years ago

It is open source and apache licensed, how was it killed off?

bonzoesc2• 14 years ago

The repo's still up: https://github.com/basho/luwak

bitops• 14 years ago

They didn't kill it, they just stopped supporting and developing it. I spoke to them at Clojure/West about luwak and they said that Riak-CS is the better alternative; they wrote Riak-CS to replace luwak.

siculars• 14 years ago

Interesting. Grats on the announcement. Will Riak CS support range requests on binary objects? Aka. give me bytes 100-200.

reiddraper• 14 years ago

Yep

rarrrrrr2• 14 years ago

How many options are there for an open source cloud storage product you can run at your own site now?

I'm sure I've overlooked a few, but the ones I'm aware of (roughly in chronological order of when they first became usable) are:

Eucalyptus's Walrus http://open.eucalyptus.com/wiki/EucalyptusStorage_v1.4

OpenStack's Swift http://swift.openstack.org/

SpiderOak's Nimbus.io https://nimbus.io/

Basho's Riak CS http://basho.com/products/riakcs/

Glad to see so much interest in this space.

I think Basho made a good strategic choice with what they call "Per-Tenant Visibility", which will facilitate other cloud hosting providers that compete with Amazon reselling Riak CS as a storage service.

izak30• 14 years ago

Yeah, OpenStack has that as well, from my understanding. I'm trying to figure out the other differences between the two.

rarrrrrr2• 14 years ago

According to the GigaOM article, Basho is charging $10,000 in licensing per storage server, so I guess it's not actually free and open source software. :(

Nimbus.io is AGPL, Swift is Apache, Walrus is either GPLv3 or BSD.

viraptor• 14 years ago

Uh... marketing speak really stands out on pages where I expect technical information: "the world’s most advanced distributed database".

Otherwise, it's nice to see S3 becoming a web storage standard (or one standard emerging in general). Openstack Swift also supports it.

nakkiel• 14 years ago

I'm actually convinced it's a little sad that S3 becomes the defacto standard.

At its core, S3 is a key-value store and I don't think it's a very feature-full one at that. Indeed it has some very good features but I'm afraid people simply implement its API rather than spend time innovating.

Two things that I have in mind: - Retention delay - REST API (although both Swift and RiakCS implement that)

Basho Unveils New Cloud Storage Software: Riak CS

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