

Building a Riak Cluster On Brightbox cloud - _russelldb
http://brightbox.com/blog/2012/01/04/riak-cluster/

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

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siculars
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.

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tptacek
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.

~~~
siculars
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.

