December 4, 2013

Way back on March 19th, 2013, we published our first Riak and Riak CS quarterly community survey. Our last survey wrapped up on October 25th, 2013, so here are some anonymized results we wanted to share with you.

Results

Riak Version

Google Chrome has a great reputation for keeping user installations current. For Riak, it’s great to see that a large number of our community users are running Riak 1.4 and above.

Operating System

My operating system is better than yours.

Backend

LevelDB usage continues to grow. For those of you who are running it in production, do yourself a favor and watch Matthew Von-Maszewski’s talk on optimizing LevelDB from RICON East 2013.

Ring Size

Riak’s default configuration ships with 64. The highest our supported customers use is 1024. Here are ring sizes running in the wild.

Average Object Size

Large objects (upwards of 4MB) can make Riak clusters unhappy. Luckily, all users who completed the Q3 survey are storing objects that average under 1MB.

(If you’re looking for something to store objects that are hundreds of megabytes to terabytes in size, have a look at Riak CS.)

Configuration Management

Configuration management tools make life simpler for our users, enabling automated creation and management of Riak clusters.

Note: Results are based on the Q3 community survey results.

Conclusion

The goal of the community survey is to help us better understand how people are using Riak and Riak CS. Results from past surveys have been distributed internally, and in several cases have guided our decision-making process around Riak.

Our next community survey is coming up soon, so be on the lookout!

Hector Castro