March 25, 2013
t;dr – The future of Riak and Riak CS will be a significant component of RICON EAST this May. Grab a ticket before they sell out. This will be the best conference you go to all year.
Later this week we will have the full lineup of RICON EAST Speakers announced. The talks from Riak’s engineers are just about official. Here’s the complete rundown of what they will be talking about and why you should be in attendance:
Connecting Applications to Distributed Systems
Sean Cribbs, a long-time Riak hacker who currently spends most of his time in Illinois, will be giving a talk called Just Open a Socket – Connecting Applications to Distributed Systems. Sean and his team spend a lot of time working with the officially-supported client interfaces and applications that talk to Riak. He’s got some strong opinions on how this should be done, and will share those, along with some roadmap on what to expect from Riak’s suite of client libraries in the coming months. He’s also a passionate, intelligent speaker who doesn’t pull punches. You’ll want to be at this talk.
Riak CS and Distributed Cloud Storage
Riak open sourced Riak CS last week. As you can imagine, all of us here are quite excited about this. Reid Draper is a Boston-based Riak engineer who has spent many hours with the Riak CS code over the past 18 months. He’ll be talking about the architecture that underpins CS, why companies like Datapipe, Rovio, and Yahoo! JAPAN are deploying it, and why you should be building applications and services on it.
Riak Enterprise and Multi Data Center Replication
Portland, Oregon-based Chris Tilt joined the Riak team in May of last year and quickly started in on Riak Enterprise, our commercial extension to Riak that enables companies like Comcast to run Riak clusters over any number of data centers. Chris and the replication team have been working alongside some huge Riak customers to refine and extend this functionality. He’s planning to share some insights into production deployments and bring you up to speed on what’s in store for the best Multi Data Center replication available on the market.
Yokozuna and the Future of Distributed Search
Integrated Full-Text Search has been a supported feature of Riak since the 1.0 release. Companies like Best Buy rely on it in production to power product catalogs and help generate revenue. Ryan Zezeski, a seasoned Riak engineer who hails from Baltimore, has been hard at work on Yokozuna, the next generation of Riak’s search capabilities. His talk Yokozuna: Distributed Search You Don’t Think About (abstract forthcoming) will detail the work he, Riak, and the community have been doing to refine Riak’s Search capabilities. You’ll leave this talk excited to build applications on Yokozuna. It’s going to be a powerful platform for scalable applications that need distributed, full-text search.
LevelDB and Tuning Riak at Scale
Matthew Von-Maszewski (known here at Riak as “MVM”) was brought on last year to focus on Riak’s local storage engines. He’s spent months tearing apart LevelDB, and is at the forefront of making it a performant, efficient backend for high-scale systems in production. His talk Optimizing LevelDB for Performance and Scale will be an overview of how LevelDB works, followed by an in-depth look at how we are tuning it for demanding workloads in Riak. This is not to be missed.
The Future of Riak and Why Riak Believes in Distributed Systems
Andy Gross is Riak’s Chief Architect. He, along with Justin Sheehy, Bryan Fink, and few other early Riak engineers were the driving forces behind the existence of Riak. Andy will be the opening keynote on Day 2 of RICON EAST. He’ll be talking about our general vision and plan for Riak and Riak CS, and why Riak believes deeply in the future of distributed system in production.
In addition to these official talks, much of the Riak team will floating around RICON EAST, awaiting your questions, opinions, and ideas for the future of Riak. We’re looking forward to your input and contributions. Keep an eye on the full speaker roster for the remaining talk announcements. We’ve got a few big names to come. In the mean time, buy a ticket before they disappear and stay up-to-date on the social side of RICON EAST on the Lanyrd page.
Thanks for being a part of RICON. See you in May.
