
Basho Relaunches to Deliver a Cohesive Big Data Platform - mihailovi4
http://www.forbes.com/sites/benkepes/2015/05/27/basho-relaunches-to-deliver-a-cohesive-big-data-platform/
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schmichael
Orchestrate was founded by ex-Basho people, built this product as a service,
and have already been acquired. This is a pretty slow "fast follow."

edit: (Although I think Orchestrate used HBase behind the scenes instead of
Riak, which is probably a more appealing stack for Enterprises since Hadoop is
more accepted than Riak.)

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samwgoldman
Basho has experienced some MAJOR brain drain in the last year. I wonder if
this re-positioning is related to that.

~~~
jtuple
To be honest, the repositioning isn't really a response to the brain drain --
it's a reflection of a changing culture at Basho that was the cause of the
brain drain in the first place.

The primary reason I left Basho is that I felt the company was turning into a
"don't invent here" culture, the polar opposite of "not invented here". The
goal was no longer to solve hard distributed systems problems and build
amazing technology, but to just integrate various "trendy" technologies and
make an enterprise simplification play.

The problem is that most of these other technologies have major failings
and/or punt on the corner cases that us old time Basho engineers obsessed
over.

The whole point of Riak was to be the most highly available, fault tolerant,
trusted database you could use. You can't just integrate Riak with arbitrary
products X, Y, and Z without compromising on those core tenants.

I really hope Basho can deliver on the promises they're making about this data
platform product. I really do. But, for various reasons I can't really talk
about, I'd say I'm extremely skeptical.

(BTW, for those that don't know me: I'm a former Principal Engineer at Basho
and was the lead developer on a variety of sub-systems in Riak over the last
four years)

~~~
deegles
Would you still recommend using Riak?

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MCRed
I used Riak for several years and was a big fan (still am of that version) but
I migrated to CouchBase because it had some key features that were important
to me that Riak lacked (Riak was just a KV store at that point).

I'm very happy with CouchBase and I feel like they are way ahead of everyone
else in terms of skating to where there puck is going to be. In fact, at the
time I was using Riak they were moving very fast engineering wise and building
great stuff- and CouchBase was still figuring out what it wanted to be when it
grew up (with the merger of Membase and CouchDB/CouchIO). Now the roles are
reversed. CouchBase is the one that's moving fast without breaking stuff.

To be honest, I think CouchBase is the secret sauce of what I'm doing. I laugh
at all the MongoDB posts on HN especially given so rarely that CouchBase gets
mentioned.

I'm not bashing Riak- it's solidly engineered.

~~~
mratzloff
Good info. Currently considering CouchBase vs Riak for pure K/V use case. Had
been leaning CouchBase and this reinforces that.

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paulsutter
Is anyone able to parse the explanation below for "Data Gravity"? Even with a
great product like Riak, it's difficult to build a hypergrowth standalone
business. So apparently they got Cloudera-envy, and decided to.. uh..
synergize new paradigms, and reintermediate plug-and-play partnerships, or
something.

> Data gravity describes the effect that as data accumulates, there is a
> greater likelihood that additional services and applications will be
> attracted to this data, essentially having the same effect gravity has on
> objects around a planet. As the mass and density increases, so does the
> strength of the gravitational pull and as things get closer to the mass,
> they accelerate towards it at increasing velocity. Although services and
> applications have their own gravity, data is the most massive and dense,
> meaning it has the most gravity. If data becomes large enough it can become
> virtually impossible to move. Usually as services and applications interact
> with data, they cause even more rapid growth of the data itself, creating a
> continuous cycle of data growth.

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robdimsdale
I'm really excited by RiakCS (now rebranded as RiakS2) because when it works,
it offers a powerful on-premise version of S3. I've been integrating it with
Cloud Foundry for about a year now, repackaging it to deploy with BOSH, but
it's been a constant source of frustration.

From an operator perspective it's incredibly hard to install and configure -
the onboarding process to create a cluster from scratch is terrible and the
outputted logs are often little more than erlang stack dumps. As an example,
I've already spent days trying to get riak-cs 2.0 running on a stock ubuntu
14.04 machine. It should not be this difficult to stand up a product out of
the box.

Basho's support engineers are generally well intentioned but often their
response is "run the following erlang command, and reply to us with the
response (also in erlang)". As an operator, I have no idea what effect the
provided commands have on my system, now what the output should tell me.
Similarly, it took months for their support/engineering team to answer a
support ticket about garbage collection - eventually providing us some
defaults such that RiakCS would perform garbage collection out of the box.
They could not tell us why these settings would work, nor any side-effects of
changing low-level parameters.

From a product perspective, Basho do not appear willing or able to support the
open-source community around their products - typically every answer we've
received boils down to "it depends on your use case" and effectively "it
should work, I don't believe you are seeing the issues you are raising".

I really hope this 're-positioning' results in more support for operators and
the community in general. RiakS2 has a lot of potential and I hope Basho are
able to realize this.

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tptacek
Do I understand correctly that Basho is now a platform-as-service company,
like Compose or Heroku, rather than an enterprise database product company?

~~~
rch
Doesn't seem that way to me. I see it as a way of taking some elaborate
service integration work and wrapping it up as a platform one might deploy in
house.

~~~
siculars
What @rch said. (I work for basho)

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rch
Looks like a nice product, but I can't seem to find details on the internal
message routing... Is it built on Redis pub/sub, Riak itself, or something
else altogether?

And I wish the branding was toned down. As it is, I'm reluctant to direct
coworkers or friends to the site despite my interest.

~~~
siculars
The value add on riak is riak_core[0][1][2] which handles data
distribution/replication and the like.

[0] [https://github.com/basho/riak_core](https://github.com/basho/riak_core)
[1] [http://basho.com/understanding-riak_core-
handoff/](http://basho.com/understanding-riak_core-handoff/) [2]
[http://basho.com/understanding-riak_core-building-
handoff/](http://basho.com/understanding-riak_core-building-handoff/)

(I work for basho)

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sirstompsalot
Biggest thing I can't stand about the new overhaul is the barrier for the open
source version - I want to evaluate for my purposes, not give you my email.

Been following Riak for some time now, and I'm hopeful this will do good
things for Basho.

~~~
siculars
Pull the source from github[0]...

[0] [https://github.com/basho/riak](https://github.com/basho/riak)

(I work for basho)

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bra-ket
no performance benchmarks in sight

