Several Riak team members will be presenting on distributed systems topics at QCon San Francisco.
SAN FRANCISCO, CA – November 7, 2012 – Attending QCon International Software Development Conference this week in San Francisco? We’d love to meet up and talk to you about Riak! You can catch us in the exhibitor’s hall all week, or at the welcome party taking place after the talks Wednesday, November 7 at Thirsty Bear. Additionally, several Riak team members will be presenting on distributed systems topics. Check out the talk synopsis below and hope to see you there.
Thursday, November 8
Riak and Dynamo, 5 Years Later
Andy Gross, Riak Chief Architect
October 2012 marks the five year anniversary of Amazon’s seminal Dynamo paper, which inspired most of the NoSQL databases that appeared shortly after its publication, including Riak. In this session, Andy will reflect on five years of involvement with Riak and distributed databases and discuss what went right, what went wrong, and what the next five years may hold for Riak as we outgrow our Dynamo roots.
Fear No More: Embrace Eventual Consistency
Sean Cribbs, Riak Software Engineer
A number of years ago, Eric Brewer, father of the CAP theorem, coined an architectural style of loosely-coupled distributed systems “BASE”, meaning, “Basically Available, Soft-state, and Eventually-consistent”. Clearly he meant this as a counterpoint to the “ACID” properties of traditional database systems. BASE systems choose to remain available to operations, sacrificing strict synchronization. While developers are very comfortable with the convenience of ACID, eventual consistency can be frightening, unfamiliar territory.
This talk will dive into the design of eventually consistent systems, touching on theory and practice. We’ll see why EC doesn’t mean “inconsistent” but is actually a different kind of consistency, with different tradeoffs. These new skills should help developers know when to embrace eventually-consistent solutions instead of fearing them.
Friday, November 9
Dynamo: Theme and Variations
Shanley Kane, Riak Director of Product Management
The Dynamo paper, released by Amazon five years ago, laid out a set of technical “themes” for highly available, fault-tolerant distributed systems. Since then, numerous NoSQL products have been built on its core principles. These “variations,” along with recent advances in research, represent both a fascinating study in technical evolution and the forefront of the non-relational world. In this talk, we’ll cover the foundations of Dynamo – consistent hashing, vector clocks, hinted handoff, gossip protocol – advances in each area, and how querying and application development has changed as a result of them.