Open Riak – open, modern Riak fork

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.

I would tend to agree, perhaps a decade ago it was easier to define the uniqueness of Riak, and now there are alternatives that offer similar guarantees. So the relevance of Riak is not as obvious.

Also as we focus on stability on OpenRiak going forward, that means reducing some of the capability that may have made Riak stand-out in the scale-out space. The preference going forward is to do fewer things, but do those things predictably well.

There will be differences between Riak and FoundationDB, and I hope those differences are sufficient to make Riak interesting, and allow it to continue to occupy a small niche in the world of databases.

I spent a lot of time with NoSQL systems in the early 2010s and I think what “killed” them was processors and networks getting so much faster that Postgres “just worked” for more and more use cases.

There are systems I’ve built in the past with 20+ Cassandra nodes and tens of thousands of ops that were originally built on MySQL/Postgresql but migrated to Cassandra because the performance/cost of the SQL systems was just to high.

Now those performance requirements can be handled cheaply with 1 or 2 beefy PostgreSQL databases. The level of scale you need today to make put up with something like Cassandra is much higher while yesteryear it felt like every startup was falling over once they found pmf