September 17, 2013
The Praekelt Foundation is a non-profit that builds open source, scalable mobile technologies and solutions to improve the health and well-being of people living in poverty. Their Vumi solution was created as a response to the rapid spread of mobile phones across Africa. Vumi allows for large scale mobile messaging using SMS and USSD, so no internet connectivity is required. Vumi uses Riak as a super reliable backend to store all the messages that are being processed and all responses. This data is all archived to allow for further analysis to see trends of areas and which campaigns are the most successful.
The Vumi Network reaches hundreds of thousands of end users across many countries. It works with non-governmental organizations to set up campaigns and services for emerging markets. These include education (Wikipedia uses Vumi to allow end-users to search and retrieve information from Wikipedia over SMS/USSD), health (partnering with Johnson & Johnson, the MAMA campaign (Mobile Alliance for Maternal Action) allows pregnant women to receive health information over SMS based pregnancy stage and HIV diagnosis), peaceful messaging (Sisi Ni Amani uses Vumi to prevent election violence in Kenya through grassroots engagement and tracking of early conflict warning signs), as well as many other utilities.
They had been using Postgres for years but, when it came to storing messages, they knew Postgres was only an interim solution. Since they needed a non-relational system, they started evaluating the key players in the NoSQL space. With MongoDB, they found the durability defaults needed for a performance boost were not adequate for their zero downtime needs; CouchDB did not give them the performance they needed; and Cassandra was too operationally intensive for their small team and Riak offered better features. When they began testing Riak, Praekelt Foundation Chief Engineer, Simon de Haan, was able to get a three-node cluster up and running on his laptop in 20 minutes. This operational simplicity, the reliability of the system, the ability to seamlessly scale to entire populations, and the range of query options made Riak a clear choice to power Vumi.
“It blew my mind how easy it was to set up Riak and was a huge selling point for our small operations team,” said de Haan. “We also needed a reliable system with solid up-time guarantees. Riak has never gone down on us and continues to survive individual restarts. The whole thing just works.”
Since launching Riak two years ago, they are running five nodes and push 1,000 messages each second. All messages are stored as JSON in Riak, which makes it easy for them utilize Secondary Indexing and MapReduce when querying this data. With the introduction of pagination with Secondary Indexes and Eventually Consistent Counters in Riak 1.4, they have also been able to move a lot of data from Redis over to Riak to take advantage of these new features. Additionally, The Praekelt Foundation will expand their querying capabilities later this year when Riak Search gets a makeover in the Riak 2.0 release.
The Praekelt Foundation is currently evaluating Riak and Riak CS for some of their other technologies and Riak is proud to be a part of such a great cause. For more information on the Praekelt Foundation and Vumi, visit their site at www.praekeltfoundation.org/
