Riak Blog
riak.com · Company blog · on HN since 2019
Riak's company blog, from the makers of the Riak distributed database, covers Bitcask, vector clocks, and why to avoid microservices.
What HN saysHN commenters praise the 'Microservices – Please, Don't' post as a succinct counter to microservice claims, and value the Bitcask paper and vector clock articles.
16HN people shared it
9linked it in comments
7stories submitted
145story points
4 months agolast shared
2019people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Bitcask: A Log-Structured Hash Table for Fast Key/Value Data [pdf]4 people · 5 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 2Microservices – Please, Don’t (2016)3 people · 2 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 3Homepage2 people · first shared 2019
- 4Microservices – Please, Don’t (2016)1 people · 136 points · first shared 2022 · 92 comments on HN
- 5Why Vector Clocks are Easy (2010)1 people · 1 points · first shared 2023 · 3 comments on HN
- 6Why Vector Clocks Are Hard (2010)1 people · 1 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 7Riak kv1 people · first shared 2022
- 8Post 50441 people · first shared 2024
- 9Index1 people · first shared 2023
- 10Technical1 people · first shared 2021
What HN people wrote when they linked it
kreetx · 2025-04-22
Interesting website design: https://riak.com - reminds me of CSS Zen Garden. (Not that it says anything about how it performs etc.)
Cthulhu_ · 2024-02-13
Microservices to reduce complexity and coupling is a fallacy. https://riak.com/posts/technical/microservices-please-dont/ is a great and succinct counter to all the advantages that microservices claim to have. In summary:
> You don’t need to introduce a network boundary as an excuse to write better code
> Distributed Transactions are never easy
> A bunch of engineers working in isolated codebases leads to ‘Not my problem’ syndrome
josephg · 2022-05-08
I hadn't heard about bitcask before. Its design looks like a great alternative to LSM trees or B+trees like lmdb. Are there any good benchmarks comparing the approaches?
The introductory whitepaper on bitcask's design is here: https://riak.com/assets/bitcask-intro.pdf
Communitivity · 2021-02-01
Not papers or books, but I'd recommend you look at the blog articles and such that Basho published about their design of Riak. In particular, they wrote a great article explaining vector clocks as opposed to other synchronizing mechanisms, and they wrote several good articles on CRDTs.
https://riak.com/category/technical/ - Riak blog
https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/files/amazon-dynamo-sosp2007.pdf - Dynamo paper that Riak was in part based on
lelf · 2019-11-06
And https://riak.com
EwanToo · 2024-11-19
It's realistically for the handful (dozens at most?) of very large Riak implementations where it would be enormously expensive to rewrite the application running on top of it.
For example, the UK NHS Spine messaging system which has been building on Riak for 10 years
https://riak.com/posts/press/nhs-launches-upgraded-it-backbone-spine-p…
themodelplumber · 2023-02-21
Apparently exists here:
https://riak.com/why-vector-clocks-are-easy/index.html
mempko · 2019-04-10
Would Riak's Bitcask format fit the bill here?
https://riak.com/assets/bitcask-intro.pdf
twic · 2022-05-29
I don't know of any rule of English grammar that would lead to this interpretation. If you do, you should immediately write to the maintainers of these websites:
https://redis.com/nosql/key-value-databases/
https://www.mongodb.com/databases/key-value-database
https://aws.amazon.com/nosql/key-value/
https://etcd.io/docs/v3.4/learning/why/
https://riak.com/products/riak-kv/
https://rocksdb.org/
https://github.com/google/leveldb
http://www.memcached.org/