January 28, 2013
Copious is a social commerce marketplace that makes it easy for people to buy and sell the things they love. Copious uses social data from Facebook and Twitter to customize the shopping and selling experience for each individual user around their interests, taste, and style. This connects buyers and sellers to each other in a unique way that also presents exciting technical challenges.
In the summer of 2012, Copious decided to switch to Riak from MongoDB for their social login functionality. They currently store all registered accounts in Riak as well as the tokens that make it possible for users to authenticate with Copious via their Facebook or Twitter accounts. Copious now stores hundreds of thousands of keys in Riak.
Copious found that Riak’s key/value data model was a natural fit for their authentication scheme and that it was easy to set up and run on Amazon Web Services. They run an HTTP service in front of Riak that presents data in the appropriate form and handles events between the front-end application and the backend data storage.
“Operating in a cloud environment, our infrastructure must be resilient to failure. Sometimes machines or even entire availability zones just disappear, and Riak’s fault-tolerant design means we remain available despite these failures. Riak is one component we never worry about, and requires much less operational work than other datastores,” said Robert Zuber, co-founder of Copious.
Copious is one of the many companies now using a polyglot approach to their platform – using Riak alongside MySQL, Redis, SOLR, and other technologies depending on the problem they need to solve. They chose to use Riak for their social login functionality because of its operational simplicity, which allows them to easily scale up without sharding and provides the high availability required for a smooth user experience. Based on their success with Riak, Zuber has said that they are looking to move more data to Riak in the future.
You can sign up now on Copious to earn $10 off your first $20+ purchase, plus the added bonus of knowing that Riak is in the background helping the site do its magic. If you’re in San Francisco, make sure to attend our Riak meetup on Wednesday, February 13, where Copious will be presenting how they use Riak alongside other datastores.
To learn more about how Riak can benefit your eCommerce or retail platform, join our webcast, “Riak on Retail” on February 8th!
