The primary reason I left Basho is that I felt the company was turning into a "don't invent here" culture, the polar opposite of "not invented here". The goal was no longer to solve hard distributed systems problems and build amazing technology, but to just integrate various "trendy" technologies and make an enterprise simplification play.
The problem is that most of these other technologies have major failings and/or punt on the corner cases that us old time Basho engineers obsessed over.
The whole point of Riak was to be the most highly available, fault tolerant, trusted database you could use. You can't just integrate Riak with arbitrary products X, Y, and Z without compromising on those core tenants.
I really hope Basho can deliver on the promises they're making about this data platform product. I really do. But, for various reasons I can't really talk about, I'd say I'm extremely skeptical.
(BTW, for those that don't know me: I'm a former Principal Engineer at Basho and was the lead developer on a variety of sub-systems in Riak over the last four years)
I can't speculate on how that all relates to brain drain.
It's a nice database, but not well understood. I've found it difficult to communicate how everything fits together to people do don't use this stuff everyday, so maybe this will help? At least it makes it clear that a seemingly complex configuration is perfectly valid and workable in practice.
(I work for basho)
And I wish the branding was toned down. As it is, I'm reluctant to direct coworkers or friends to the site despite my interest.
[0] https://github.com/basho/riak_core [1] http://basho.com/understanding-riak_core-handoff/ [2] http://basho.com/understanding-riak_core-building-handoff/
(I work for basho)
Been following Riak for some time now, and I'm hopeful this will do good things for Basho.
[0] https://github.com/basho/riak
(I work for basho)
edit: (Although I think Orchestrate used HBase behind the scenes instead of Riak, which is probably a more appealing stack for Enterprises since Hadoop is more accepted than Riak.)
> Data gravity describes the effect that as data accumulates, there is a greater likelihood that additional services and applications will be attracted to this data, essentially having the same effect gravity has on objects around a planet. As the mass and density increases, so does the strength of the gravitational pull and as things get closer to the mass, they accelerate towards it at increasing velocity. Although services and applications have their own gravity, data is the most massive and dense, meaning it has the most gravity. If data becomes large enough it can become virtually impossible to move. Usually as services and applications interact with data, they cause even more rapid growth of the data itself, creating a continuous cycle of data growth.
From an operator perspective it's incredibly hard to install and configure - the onboarding process to create a cluster from scratch is terrible and the outputted logs are often little more than erlang stack dumps. As an example, I've already spent days trying to get riak-cs 2.0 running on a stock ubuntu 14.04 machine. It should not be this difficult to stand up a product out of the box.
Basho's support engineers are generally well intentioned but often their response is "run the following erlang command, and reply to us with the response (also in erlang)". As an operator, I have no idea what effect the provided commands have on my system, now what the output should tell me. Similarly, it took months for their support/engineering team to answer a support ticket about garbage collection - eventually providing us some defaults such that RiakCS would perform garbage collection out of the box. They could not tell us why these settings would work, nor any side-effects of changing low-level parameters.
From a product perspective, Basho do not appear willing or able to support the open-source community around their products - typically every answer we've received boils down to "it depends on your use case" and effectively "it should work, I don't believe you are seeing the issues you are raising".
I really hope this 're-positioning' results in more support for operators and the community in general. RiakS2 has a lot of potential and I hope Basho are able to realize this.
