Welcome Riak 1.3 to Engine Yard

Hello friends! A few months ago we rolled out support for Riak, Basho’s distributed key/value database, on the Engine Yard stack. Today we want to share with you the improvements we’ve made to the product, including the release of a brand new version, 1.3. We hope you are as excited about this release as we are. It includes major enhancements and features.

We want to make it easier than ever to get started with Riak on our platform and we’ve made a video to help you. Follow Edward’s screencast and you’ll have a production-ready cluster in a matter of minutes.

Introducing Riak from Engine Yard on Vimeo.

Why you should use/upgrade to Riak 1.3

Here is a summary of the enhancements included in version 1.3 that you definitely want to be aware of. For more information check Basho’s Introducing Riak 1.3 documentation.

Active Anti-Entropy

Riak is designed to be highly available. This means that the database understands and can survive (normally catastrophic) events like node-failures and data inconsistencies. These inconsistencies, often referred to as ‘entropy’, can arise due to failure modes, concurrent updates, and physical data loss or corruption. Ironically these events are not uncommon in distributed systems and the Cloud is the most pervasive example.

Riak already had several features for repairing this “entropy” (lost or corrupted data), but they required user intervention. Riak 1.3 introduces active anti-entropy (AAE) to solve this problem automatically. The AAE process repairs cluster entropy on an ongoing basis by using data replicated in other nodes to heal itself. This feature is enabled by default on Riak 1.3 clusters.

Improved MapReduce

Riak supports MapReduce queries in both JavaScript and Erlang for aggregation and analytics tasks. In Riak 1.3, tunable backpressure is extended to the MapReduce sink to prevent problems at endpoint processes. (Backpressure keeps Riak processes from being overwhelmed and it also prevents memory consumption getting out of control.)

New file system default on EBS-backed Riak clusters

Now when creating a EBS-backed Riak cluster we’ll format your volume using the ext4 file system instead of ext3. This change enhances I/O performance and durability.

Riak Haproxy enabled in utility instances

In addition to application instances, we now allow utility instances to address Riak cluster nodes using haproxy.

And there is more! Riak 1.3 provides Advanced Multi-Datacenter Replication Capabilities (available for Riak Enterprise customers). This release also provides better performance, more TCP connections and easier configuration.

Give it a try!

With 500 hours for free you can try Riak 1.3 without any hassle. We have you covered! All of our Riak installations come with full support from us at Engine Yard and from our partner Basho.