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Riak still alive and kicking!
Updated April 16, 2024

Riak still alive and kicking!

Nicholas Adams | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Riak

Used as a data store in multiple scenarios. Everything from individual pair values such as datetime against currency exchange value through to large scale storage for videos and images. This was implemented in multiple clusters and tried on hardware varying from Raspberry Pi through to full rack mount servers. We also contributed towards the open source codebase.
  • Key-Value storage along with CRDTs
  • Fault tolerance
  • 100% uptime
  • Massively scalable
  • Consistent response speeds
  • Multi datacentre replication
  • Geographic replication/redundancy
  • Is free to use
  • Lots of client libraries
  • Missing a free text search function
  • More security work
  • Multi-tenant reporting
  • More types of index optimised for different structures
  • Automating repairs especially after unclean shutdowns
  • WebDAV/Samba shares for Riak CS
  • Implementing the SQL queries from Riak TS in Riak KV
  • Settable replication bandwidth caps
  • Safemode start up after failure
  • More client integrations
Riak is well suited to applications such as:
Transaction logging e.g. financial transactions and/or exchange rates.
Storing time series data, especially IoT.
Storing massive amounts of data e.g. corporation wide backups, data lakes etc.
A fully s3 compatible replacement for Amazon s3 ensuring data privacy.

Riak is not as well suited to:
Traditional RDBMS functions, especially those that join the outputs of one or more queries together to produce the desired result.

Overall Satisfaction Continued

  • Great ROI, has helped us generate significant revenue.
  • Low support costs as it hardly ever has any problems once correctly set up.
  • The only issue we had in so far was one development cluster overheating and periodically shutting down when its cooling system failed but that's a hardware issue, not a software one.
MongoDB seems to have copied a lot of functionality from Riak. This may be because MongoDB hired a number of former Basho engineers when Basho went bankrupt. That said, the new functions added to Riak after it became open source have successfully differentiated itself from MongoDB.

Amazon S3 is a nice tool but when you are at significant scale with regionally specific data (joys of GDPR), it's much easier to keep it in house and Riak CS lets you do exactly that. All you need to do is point your application at Riak CS instead of Amazon S3 and it just works as if nothing has changed.

When we evaluated against Cassandra, we found the tools available did not match our needs at the time.

Do you think Riak delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Riak's feature set?

Yes

Did Riak live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Riak go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Riak again?

Yes

Riak Feature Ratings

NoSQL Databases
9.4
Performance
10
Availability
10
Concurrency
10
Security
6
Scalability
10
Data model flexibility
10
Deployment model flexibility
10

Riak Support

Despite Basho going bankrupt and the project becoming fully open-source, community support is reasonably good, albeit a little slow at times. Paid enterprise-grade support is also available from former Basho engineers but the same company also contributes to the community support for free for basic questions or specific knowledge areas.
ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
No escalation required
Immediate help available
Support understands my problem
Support cares about my success
Quick Initial Response
None
As a full disclaimer, I used to be a Basho CSE (until 2017), so have experienced the support firsthand on both sides of the fence. For those with engineers who are very familiar with Riak and its workings, there is no need to purchase support. However, if your engineers are inexperienced with Riak, I would recommend getting support at least for your first year to make sure everything gets set up properly.
Yes - Yes. I have reported multiple issues over the years and have even had some patches I submitted accepted and added in to the repositories.