October 15, 2015
Basho and Riak
Basho was on my (very short) blacklist of companies with whom I refuse to speak, because they have lied about the contents of previous conversations. But Tony Falco et al. are long gone from the company. So when Basho’s new management team reached out, I took the meeting.
For starters:
- Basho management turned over significantly 1-2 years ago. The main survivors from the old team are 1 each in engineering, sales, and services.
- Basho moved its headquarters to Bellevue, WA. (You get one guess as to where the new CEO lives.) Engineering operations are very distributed geographically.
- Basho claims that it is much better at timely product shipments than it used to be. Its newest product has a planned (or at least hoped-for) 8-week cadence for point releases.
- Basho’s revenue is ~90% subscription.
- Basho claims >200 enterprise clients, vs. 100-120 when new management came in. Unfortunately, I forgot to ask the usual questions about divisions vs. whole organizations, OEM sell-through vs. direct, etc.
- Basho claims an average contract value of >$100K, typically over 2-3 years. $9 million of that (which would be close to half the total, actually), comes from 2 particular deals of >$4 million each.
Basho’s product line has gotten a bit confusing, but as best I understand things the story is:
- There’s something called Riak Core, which isn’t even a revenue-generating product. However, it’s an open source project with some big users (e.g. Goldman Sachs, Visa), and included in pretty much everything else Basho promotes.
- Riak KV is the key-value store previously known as Riak. It generates the lion’s share of Basho’s revenue.
- Riak S2 is an emulation of Amazon S3. Basho thinks that Riak KV loses efficiency when objects get bigger than 1 MB or so, and that’s when you might want to use Riak S2 in addition or instead.
- Riak TS is for time series, and just coming out now.
- Also in the mix are some (extra charge) connectors for Redis and Spark. Presumably, there are more of these to come.
- There’s an umbrella marketing term of “Basho Data Platform”.
Technical notes on some of that include:
- Riak Core doesn’t do data management. It just manages distributed operation of — well, whatever you want to operate. In part, Basho sees Riak Core as a better Apache ZooKeeper.
- That is the essence of the Riak/Spark pitch — something better than ZooKeeper for cluster management, and I presume some help in persisting Spark RDDs as well.
- The Riak/Redis pitch is even simpler — cluster management for Redis, and persistent backing as well.
- Basho’s criticisms of ZooKeeper start with “Cluster manager, manage thyself” claims about ZooKeeper availability, as in the PagerDuty ZooKeeper critique.
- Riak KV has secondary indexing. Performance is somewhat questionable. It also has Solr indexing, which is fast.
- At least in its 1.0 form, Riak TS assumes:
- There’s some kind of schema or record structure.
- There are explicit or else easily-inferred timestamps.
- Microsecond accuracy, perfect ordering and so on are not essential.
- Thus, Riak TS 1.0 is not ideal for the classic Splunk use case where you text index/search on a lot of log emissions. It also is not ideal for financial tick storage.
- Riak TS has range-based partitioning, where the range is in terms of time. Basho refers to this as “locality”.
- Riak TS has a SQL subset. Evidently there’s decent flexibility as to which part of the database carries which schema.
- Riak has a nice feature of allowing you stage a change to network topology before you push it live.
- Riak’s vector clock approach to wide-area synchronization is more controversial.
Finally, notes on what Basho sees as use cases and competition include:
- Riak KV is generally used to store usual-suspect stuff — log data, user/profile data and so on.
- Basho thinks NoSQL is a 4-horse race — Basho/Riak KV, DataStax/Cassandra, MongoDB, Couchbase. (I would be surprised if there was much agreement with that view from, for example, MongoDB, DataStax, Aerospike, MapR or the HBase community.)
- Basho competes on availability, scalability (including across geography) and so on, or in simplest terms:
- “Availability and correctness”
- Simple operation
- Unsurprisingly, Basho thinks its closest competitor is DataStax. (However, DataStax tells me they don’t compete much with Basho.)
- Basho thinks Riak KV has ease-of-operation advantages vs. Cassandra.
- An example of a mission-critical Riak app is the UK National Health Service storing prescription information.
- An example of Riak S2 and Riak KV being used together is Turner Broadcasting storing video in the former and associated metadata in the latter.
- Riak TS is initially pointed at two use cases:
- “Internet of Things”
- “Metrics”, which seems to mean monitoring of system metrics.
- Basho sees the competition for Riak TS as starting with HBase, Cassandra, and InfluxDB.
Categories: Aerospike, Basho and Riak, Cassandra, Clustering, Couchbase, Databricks, Spark and BDAS, DataStax, HBase, Health care, Log analysis, MapR, Market share and customer counts, MongoDB, NoSQL, Pricing, Specific users, Splunk
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One Response to “Basho and Riak”
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An excellent reprise of Basho and Riak in 2015. By 2018 Basho filed for insolvency and Bet365 picked up Riak assets, including doc and code. Bet365 did a nice job inviting the community to comment on how to proceed with fully open sourcing Riak. https://bet365techblog.com/riak-update
Which brings me to my real point.
Many of the post BigTable/DynamoDB databases are now under the umbrella of The Linux Foundation – Apache and Hyperledger gardens.
Does this mean the database market has returned to its pre-SQL era roots. Where commercial firms such as ‘American Can’ incubated DBMS before spinning them out as business software companies. Examples: AMaps, Bpcs, Cullinet; generally these became MRP/ERP app suite vendors.
Thus Amazon, Facebook, Google might eventually spin out. DynamoDB, Cassandra, Spanner as cloud application databases, repeating the DBMS for apps platform cycle?
Curt, love to get your thoughts…