May 16, 2013
EklaBlog is a popular, easy-to-use blogging platform based out of Nantes, France. They host hundreds of thousands of blogs and see over eight million unique visitors each month. They use Riak to store and serve all of their static files, including images, music and documents.
EklaBlog is a relatively young tech company that started their business alongside other innovative startups at Company Campus, a popular coworking space in France. It wasn’t long before they began to see significant growth in the amount of data hosted on their platform. Like many startups, they began with a single server, instead of a single server with a backup. As they grew, access exceeded the bandwidth available and performance problems began to surface. With more and more users depending on the platform, it became clear their existing infrastructure would be a bottleneck for growth and present availability and performance problems.
EklaBlog needed a solution that would never lose data, scale quickly at low operational cost, and provide an easy-to-use HTTP interface. They also needed to serve files both quickly and predictably, with a consistent low latency profile. All of these attributes were critical to the consumer experience of their platform. After evaluating other solutions, including GlusterFS, MogileFS, and classic file storage, they selected Riak as their primary data store.
“We thoroughly evaluated a number of different solutions before selecting Riak,” said Godefroy de Compreignac, CEO at EklaBlog. “Now we are absolutely convinced that Riak is the most reliable and cost-efficient solution for us. It’s the perfect fit for our needs.”
They launched with Riak in the beginning of 2013 and quickly scaled their cluster up from four to five nodes, each with 1.8TB of usable storage. They use Bitcask, Riak’s default low-level storage backend. Bitcask’s write-once, append-only nature enables very high throughput and low latency. Eklablog currently stores 5.8TB of data in Riak. They add about 15GB of new data each day, serving hundreds of queries per second.
For Eklablog, Riak’s key/value data model provides a simple structure that’s well suited to serving large volumes of image, music, and document files. Eklablog provides three specific platforms, and uses a Riak bucket for each. Files are stored with a unique key generated via a hash function.
You can learn more about EklaBlog at EklaBlog.com and visit Riak.com/Riak for more information about Riak.
