Who is Using Riak
This is a partial list of companies, projects, organizations and consultancies (that we know about) using Riak to build truly awesome and innovative software and services. If you’re using Riak and want to be listed here, fork the Wiki repo on GitHub and add your details or email mark@basho.com if you have any questions.
Mozilla Test Pilot is a platform collecting structured user feedback through Firefox. Test Pilot studies explore how people use their web browser and the Internet – and help us build better products
The Test Pilot Team is running multiple Riak clusters to gather user data and perform large-scale analysis on this data using Riak’s MapReduce functionality.
Widescript is a digital reading application targeted to people who study or make use of reference material. It allows them to interact with their texts, everywhere. The development of the idea started in early 2010 and the application is currently in private beta.
From Lead Developer Francisco Treacy: “As Riak is content-type agnostic and excels at consistency/availability fine-tuning, it is being used to persist several kinds of data in Widescript’s application – logging, user metadata, multimedia assets. Not only it was chosen for its distributed nature, but because it goes hand in hand with Widescript’s Javascript development stack.”
Hitta.se (“Find.se”) is a Swedish search engine that offers telephone directory, addresses and maps. The site was founded in June 2004 and has grown steadily since then. As of 2010 the site averages well above 3 million unique visitors per week and is ranked in the top 10 of the largest sites in Sweden. Revenue comes from different forms of advertising and company marketing products.
Hitta.se uses Riak in its back end service layer to persist critical data that requires fast distribution between multiple
nodes and tolerates eventual consistency.
Based in Seatlle, SwingVine helps you discover new music, movies, books, fashion, wines, and more. SwingVine shows you what’s hot in each category and then shows you the connections or vines between what you’re already looking at and unexplored content that you might enjoy. SwingVine then lets you personalize your discovery experience by incorporating your friends.
From Co-Founder Alan McConnell: "We’ve had a fantastic experience using Riak for a media scrapbook product we’ve recently released called SwingVine Gallery. Our legacy image storage system is over 10K lines of C++ code, and using Riak we were able to replace it with a system that is less than 1000 lines of python and performs better, scales better, and is more durable. All of our users’ scrapbook media (video, images and audio) data/metadata for the SwingVine Gallery product is housed in Riak.
Rigel Group is a small, high-impact software development company based in Carlsbad, CA. We help clients leverage cutting-edge technologies and cloud-based architectures to build high-performance, large-scale applications at absurdly low costs.
From Rigel Group CTO John Lynch: "One of our favorite tools is the Riak distributed key/value data store. Riak’s incredibly low operational costs allow clients who do not have dedicated, high-end system administration resources to still deploy large-scale, data-heavy applications. This “democratization” of Big Data is allowing smaller firms to compete with the big guys. Having a company as developer-friendly as Basho stand behind the product is also a huge win for us."
Based in Vancouver, Gastown Labs provides managed web and mobile solutions – everything from design, to planning, up through software development and managed hosting on their own proven cloud solution.
Gastown uses Riak behind their various web APIs to provide iPhone applications with scrumptious, highly-available data.
Western Communications (or “Wescom”) is a family-owned corporation founded by renowned editor Robert W. Chandler and headquartered in Bend, Oregon. We have a family of newspapers, magazines and web sites located throughout Oregon and California.
From Wescom’s IT Director Mark Turner: “Wescom’s IT team was looking at data store options for an email archiving system we were building and chose Riak for its write reliability and ease of scaling. We are using Riak to store and analyze over six million email messages a month. With the successful implementation of Riak in our email analysis and storage system we have begun testing Riak in other apps that we’re developing.”
inagist (in-a-gist) analyzes twitter content in real-time and filters out the most popular and relevant tweets. If you follow a lot of twitter sources and you want a way to get a gist of all the tweets that come into your timeline, just login using your twitter id and you will be able to see your personalized twitter trends.
inagist uses Riak for archiving tweets and analyzing trends. With Riak, they are able to do innovative things like filter a twitter thread with numerous replies to pick out only ones which are interesting and personalize threads to only show conversations among people you are interested in. They also run trend searches on data stored in Riak using MapReduce queries and Link Walking.
SensiSoft is a global services and software company specializing in classified advertising.
SensiSoft uses Riak as the datastore for its Web Archive application, used to store and archive advertisements on behalf of its clients. It also makes extensive use of Riak’s MapReduce functionality to query this archive.
Founded in 1979, [Tax Management Associates, Inc.|http://www.tma1.com/] (TMA) is the leader in assisting state and local governments with their revenue enhancement initiatives.
TMA currently uses Riak for two internal applications with plans to roll out a third, public-facing application in 2011. Currently in production are:
- An archiving application responsible for the storage and security of tax forms for more than 100 counties in North Carolina; Using Riak as a document store, TMA is able to handle data inputs from six different applications while never worrying data about versioning and scalability.
- A spidering application that uses Riak to store data and distribute work loads via replication. Riak is responsible for managing the work queue that coordinates the spidering and then stores the resulting data to be queried later using Riak’s MapReduce.
Dayfindr.com is a simple calendar collaboration tool that helps you find a day for your event where most people are available.
From Dayfindr’s Creator Benjamin Nortier: “Using Riak as the storage engine provides peace of mind for horizontal scalability in the future, and it also scales down to a small memory footprint for running on a virtual private server. In addition to having a set of hard-core technical credentials, the team and community behind Riak are highly competent and helpful, which sets it apart in a ever more crowded NoSQL market.”
The Rock of Gainesville is a vibrant, non-denominational, family-centered Christian church located in Gainesville, Florida.
The Rock used Riak to build an SMS-ready, distributed sign-up system that enables members to register for and track upcoming events.
Riak in Production: A Distributed Event Registration System Written in Erlang
We Geo is a location-enabled service that helps people work together on tasks and shopping activities that often lead them into the world to make purchases. As We Geo users accomplish their goals, our location-enabled service delivers targeted coupons, local promotions and daily deal offers based on user’s planned activities and their location. We Geo users get things done and save money on brands and services they care about.
We Geo uses Riak in its service layer to store a user’s location-specific check-ins and spending activities. Riak serves this data in many forms to the We Geo web and mobile applications and for management reporting of user activity.
ZayMobile Technology is a technology-enabler based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. They provide Web, WAP and Mobile solutions with a particular focus in Mobile Messaging.
From Principal Partner Zafua Adian Yahaya: “Our messaging gateway currently connected to the three main local mobile network operators uses Riak extensively for all our internal transactions. Riak is also used in our specialized, telco-grade, mission-critical systems in the Operational Support Systems (OSS), as well as in the Business Support Systems (BSS) areas.”
Division by Zero is a software consultancy based in New York state that specializes in Ruby/Rails application deployments, architecture & infrastructure planning consulting, and Web application Development.
From Division by Zero Founder Wayne Seguin: "One system we built integrates Postgresql, Redis and Riak as backends to several applications (including a few Ruby on Rails web applications). Postgresql is used for driving several E/R modeled applications from the same central database. Redis is used as a distributed queue system. And Riak is used for data sets that we do not want adding load to the master Postgresql database as well as for storing result sets as detailed below.
There are a several web and API applications that run off of the Postgresql database where entities and their relationships are stored. Agents run on many servers across multiple data centers. These agents submit data into a centralized Redis queue. Then several worker daemons process the data from the queues and update the database based on the information gained from the collected data.
There are many background processes (some services, some run run as cronjobs) which query the Postgresql database server in order to extract data sets, potentially very large. These extracted data sets are stored in Riak. After the data sets are stored in the Riak system, there are several reporting / aggregating (long running) processes which load the data sets from Riak. The processes compute their results and then store them back in Riak either for further processing or for retrieval. Riak keys for the results are sent to the Postgresql system thus linking the Riak result sets with the Entities they are related to in Postgresql."
Excel Collaborations & Communications (or XL59) is a hosted collaborations and communications platform service provider based in China.
XL59 uses Riak as a distributed data store in its cloud-based data distribution model. The data access layer of the XL59 Platform is formed by a Riak cluster playing the role of edge data servers that interact with centralized PostgreSQL servers.
Ask Sponsored Listings is the search engine marketing extension of Ask.com, a top tier search engine.
From VP of Technology David Weldon : “We are currently using Riak to store publisher configuration data and click statistics for our direct navigation products. I sleep well at night knowing that my system is fault-tolerant.”
DigiTar is a messaging and web security company based in Boise, Idaho. DigiTar services enhance existing messaging and web systems with next-generation feature sets, through state-of-the-art technology development.
From COO/CTO Jason Williams : When we started in 2004, there weren’t any open-source data stores that had built-in fault-tolerance or clustering that didn’t involve some form of shared storage infrastructure. This necessitated building our own homegrown partitioning and failover mechanisms to provide the reliability of a shared-nothing architecture. However, this approach has required a significant commitment to maintaining these solutions and keeping them working with the latest versions of MySQL.
By basing all of our new services and APIs on Riak, we’ve been able to focus our energies on the features our customers want, instead of keeping the infrastructure under them available. Our customers rely on us to keep their businesses functioning 24/7…and Riak has made it possible to do that without custom clustering solutions and black magic.
Riak has allowed us to focus on what we love to do – building awesome services for our customers – and less time on making the datastore behind those services always available.
UnityPark is a sister company to PikkoTekk. These two companies have made a world record game based on technology similar to Riak core. UnityPark is a middleware company producing scalable middleware that can be used by game developers using the Unity Engine. The software from UnityPark makes it possible to start producing fast-paced action games with thousands of players in the same virtual world.
One product from UnityPark, uGame NoSQL, is based on Riak. This integration software combines the strength of Unity and Riak and makes it easy for all Unity game developers to start using Riak when the game needs a scalable distributed database on the server side. Unity is the game engine with the largest user base in the world and it is growing fast.
Yammer is the leader in enterprise social networking, providing a secure way for employees to communicate, collaborate, and share information.
Yammer recently built and deployed Streamie, a mission-critical application that uses Riak as the primary datastore. Want to learn more? There’s a great write up and video on the Basho Blog that will tell you all about it.
AOL is a global Web services company with a suite of brands and offerings. The Company’s business spans online content, products and services that it offers to consumers, publishers and advertisers
The Adlearn project at a AOL has 5 nodes of Riak playing a non-trivial role in a system that delivers over 1.5 billion impressions a day. You can read more about how AOL is using Riak here.
Mobile Interactive Group (MIG) is a globally integrated mobile and digital communications business and is the fastest growing privately owned technology company in the UK and EMEA.
David Dawson, Head of Technology, Mobile Interactive Group (MIG): “We use Riak as a persistent storage layer for many of our mission-critical systems, including our international SMS Gateway which was built from the ground up to be fully scalable, high performing, and data-centre redundant, whilst also maintaining a low operational footprint.”
Swipely turns purchases into cash-back rewards at the local places you love to shop. Swipely works with the credit and debit cards you already have, so there’s no coupon to cut, voucher to buy, phone app to download, or loyalty card to lose.
Anthony Accardi, Head of Engineering, Swipely: “We store data for 15 million merchants in Riak, which we can update without disturbing the critical path of responding to the user. Riak also gives us a very predictable model for scaling our service.”
Voxer is a Walkie Talkie app for smartphones that lets you send instant audio, text and photo messages to one of more friends, and is the number one social networking app in the US, UK, Canada, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and several other countries.
Voxer uses Riak and Riak Search extensively on the backend to store, serve and analyze critical user data.
Matt Ranney, CTO, Voxer: “We need a database that can grow as our traffic grows and can reliably deliver low response times. This kind of scalability and availability doesn’t come for free, and Riak is refreshingly honest about what it takes to achieve this.”
Unison makes social software for business, allowing companies to chat, video/voice call and post to shared ‘walls.’ By giving people better ways to communicate, Unison makes offices more fun and productive.
The team at Unison was initially attracted to Riak because they use Erlang heavily internally, but also because they were looking for a fault-tolerant, scalable data storage layer that could grow with their user and customer base. The Unison server makes heavy use of Riak, relying on it as the primary storage engine for application elements like user accounts, contacts, walls, persistent chats, and call-history.
Formspring helps people find out more about each other through sharing interesting & personal responses and now, in just over 18 months since launch, has grown to more than 25 million registered users.
The team at Formspring chose Riak for various features now in production, and is working on rolling out more site functionality on Riak. They have also contributed significant amounts of code and functionality to the Riak Python Client.
- You can learn more about how Formspring is using Riak on the Basho Blog.
DotCloud is a simple application platform that lets you assemble your development stack from pre-configured and heavily tested components. You build and push the code. They’ll deploy and scale your application.
In addition to offering Riak as part of their platform, DotCloud uses Riak as a critical part of their internal infrastructure.
Clipboard is a new media service that makes it ridiculously easy to save, share, and organize clippings from around the web.
The team at Clipboard chose Riak as their primary document store because of its inherent clustered design and the fully-featured, fully-integrated search component, Riak Search.
GitHub is a social software development site used by almost a million developers worldwide. Their focus is on lowering the barrier to entry for contributors and making software a pleasure to collaborate on. Even Basho, the people who write Riak, uses it to interact with ther developer community.
GitHub chose Riak for some new service endpoints to gain operations experience with Riak before rolling out some more ambitious ideas in the future.
Mochi Media enables Flash game developers to monetize, distribute and track their games across the Internet, and enables advertisers to engage with gamers around the world. Mochi Media’s network powers over 14,000 games on over 30,000 websites reaching an audience of 100 million gamers.
Mochi Media uses Riak to store a variety of data including high scores, social graphs and save game data for Flash games. They have also developed the open source statebox library which helps users handle conflict resolution when working with eventually consistent data stores such as Riak.
Recently named the #7 free app of all time by Apple, Bump is a quick and easy way to connect two phones, simply by bumping them together.
With 50+ million users, Bump uses Riak to store records for everything sent through the Bump App and continue to migrate more data as they continue to expand.
SEOmoz makes industry-leading SEO software that makes it easy to track and improve your website’s organic marketing performance.
SEOmoz uses Riak to reliably store and process millions of search engine rankings every week, and has contributed extensively to Ripple, the Ruby Riak client library.
Founded in 2007, WorthPoint is an international, online information and media company that has quickly become the world’s largest resource for researching art, antiques and collectibles. It helps people accurately value, preserve, buy and/or sell items. The company’s core feature is a vast database of sales records, known as “Worthopedia”, which has aggregated (to date) more than 100 million items from eBay, virtual marketplaces and leading auction houses. In 2011 WorthPoint was named one of the fastest growing technology companies in Georgia and also has offices in Ohio and Ireland.
WorthPoint uses Riak as the primary storage system for Worthopedia. Specifically, Riak was chosen for its:
- reliability
- ability to scale
- excellent Java client support
“Getting a Riak test cluster up and running, complete with a five line Groovy script to start pumping in data, took less than 30 minutes on the first try. After that, we were hooked.” Mac Liaw, CTO, Worthpoint
At The NetCircle, we are passionate about connecting people around the globe – not only by building web community software, but also by contributing to the open source community. We’re nerds at heart and love being part of the web advance.
Riak plays an integral role in our clients’ web communities as our direct messaging service data store. Hundreds of thousands of messages are stored daily for multiple communities through our Riak-backed messaging service.