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Riak is NOT operations-oriented. It's nearly impossible to manage operationally without dedicated staff at scale and the tools to introspect and analyze and dea

Riak is NOT operations-oriented. It's nearly impossible to manage operationally without dedicated staff at scale and the tools to introspect and analyze and deal with failures aren't robust enough yet. I know they're just trying to contrast Riak and Cassandra with Couch and Mongo, and that Riak is designed to shard easily without the developer having to think about it. That philosophy actually is "developer-oriented" in that it SEEMS like an operational savings because it was designed by developers.

coffeemug 14y ago
That's an interesting take -- I think the Basho team positions Riak as an operations-oriented system (at least that's how I always thought about it, though I haven't used Riak in production).
rbranson 14y ago
Can you provide an example of where Riak was "nearly impossible to manage operationally without dedicated staff at scale and the tools to introspect and analyze and deal with failures aren't robust enough yet"?
- rubyrescue 14y ago
  Just watch the talk by Voxer on Riak (on Basho's site). It's basically an hour long explanation of why the things that come out of the box with Riak don't work for them. We ran into those problems as well. Also, I'm giving a talk on it in 9 days at ErlangDC...Whisper is now top 10 social networking apps and we had a number of critical Riak failures. i'll be elaborating on them, though the focus of the talk is not to bash Riak, no pun intended... just to provide our experience and how we worked around it.
argvzero 14y ago
Chief Architect at Basho here: Saying Riak is categorically non-operations-oriented is a bit hyperbolic, but I will be the first to acknowledge that we need even more visibility into failure-recovery / degraded mode situations. I've spoken to a few customers who have "cheat sheets" of Erlang console commands they use to debug things like handoff slowness or poor performance in general. This alone means we need to do better, On the other hand, Riak continues to function in scenarios where other databases would be completely unavailable. I'll take immature visibility during those situations over complete unavailability any day, I appreciate your feedback - I can assure you that this is something we're constantly working on and you'll see improvements with each release. Finally, if you've been bitten by anything specific you'd like to see fixed, we do all our development in the open at http://github.com/basho http://github.com/basho, so github issues, pull requests, etc go right into our internal tools and workflows. Cheers, Andy Gross
- rubyrescue 14y ago
  Would love to give some feedback. I like Riak and I believe in it - over the long haul I'm 100% sure it will be an amazing product. Let's grab beers at Erlang Factory! Chad
  - argvzero 14y ago
    Sounds good - I'll see you there!

coffeemug 14y ago

That's an interesting take -- I think the Basho team positions Riak as an operations-oriented system (at least that's how I always thought about it, though I haven't used Riak in production).

rbranson 14y ago

Can you provide an example of where Riak was "nearly impossible to manage operationally without dedicated staff at scale and the tools to introspect and analyze and deal with failures aren't robust enough yet"?

rubyrescue 14y ago
Just watch the talk by Voxer on Riak (on Basho's site). It's basically an hour long explanation of why the things that come out of the box with Riak don't work for them. We ran into those problems as well. Also, I'm giving a talk on it in 9 days at ErlangDC...Whisper is now top 10 social networking apps and we had a number of critical Riak failures. i'll be elaborating on them, though the focus of the talk is not to bash Riak, no pun intended... just to provide our experience and how we worked around it.

argvzero 14y ago

Chief Architect at Basho here: Saying Riak is categorically non-operations-oriented is a bit hyperbolic, but I will be the first to acknowledge that we need even more visibility into failure-recovery / degraded mode situations. I've spoken to a few customers who have "cheat sheets" of Erlang console commands they use to debug things like handoff slowness or poor performance in general. This alone means we need to do better, On the other hand, Riak continues to function in scenarios where other databases would be completely unavailable. I'll take immature visibility during those situations over complete unavailability any day, I appreciate your feedback - I can assure you that this is something we're constantly working on and you'll see improvements with each release. Finally, if you've been bitten by anything specific you'd like to see fixed, we do all our development in the open at http://github.com/basho http://github.com/basho, so github issues, pull requests, etc go right into our internal tools and workflows. Cheers, Andy Gross

rubyrescue 14y ago
Would love to give some feedback. I like Riak and I believe in it - over the long haul I'm 100% sure it will be an amazing product. Let's grab beers at Erlang Factory! Chad
- argvzero 14y ago
  Sounds good - I'll see you there!