Riak is designed to solve a new class of data management problems – specifically those around capturing, storing and processing data inside distributed, modern IT environments, such as the cloud.
Building reliable, stable and scalable distributed systems is difficult – but Riak can help. The Basho Technologies engineering team has worked hard to help individual developers and businesses envision, design, and build highly available, fault-tolerant data systems inside various distributed environments.
Deploying systems in a distributed manner involves various trade-offs. By following the core tenets of the CAP Theorem , Riak enables users to “tune” the database: in short, the user defines how consistent or fault-tolerant they want Riak to behave.
Popular use cases for Riak:
- Using Riak as a Session Store
- Cloud File System (similar to Amazon S3)
- Storing High Volumes of Social or Rich Media (video, audio, etc.)
- Using Riak as a Caching Layer
- Powering Distributed E-commerce Solutions
- Building Scalable, Dependable Mobile Applications
- In the Cloud Migrating Legacy RDBMS Systems to the Cloud
- Managing Sensor-based or RFID Network Data
- Managing User-Data for Online Social and Gaming Networks
When not to use Riak?
Riak was not designed as an ideal solution for every data storage application. Sometimes a relational database or another kind of system is the best choice. For users with a highly centralized data storage project with fixed, unchanging data structure– riak is probably not the ideal solution.
