Open Riak – open, modern Riak fork

I've never met an engineering team that used Riak, but it is used heavily as an example technology in Kleppmann's 'Designing Data Intensive Applications'. (I would say, informally, it's usually the example of the "other way" as opposed to other more well-known databases.) This does make me wonder what became of it, why it didn't take off.

Speaking as a former tech evangelist/engineer at Basho, there were a few significant challenges.

Riak is horribly unfriendly as a database: no SQL, it exposes eventual consistency directly to the developer, it’s relatively slow, and Erlang is a fairly unusual language.

While you can run Riak on a single server, you’d have to really want to.

Its strength is the ability to scale massively, but not many projects need that scale, and by the time you do, you’re probably already using some friendlier database and you’d rather make that one work.

Thing is, Cassandra became and remained popular, with similar aspects (though in JVM instead of Erlang, so).

Though it had a couple years head start when there really no other options for people wanting that kind of kit.