Back to the Riak Labs
The success of all open source products involves the ecosystem in which the code is deployed. Riak is no exception. These tools need a home, and that highlights our dependency on public maintainership which brings my focus to Riak Labs.
The philosophy is simple: have every Riak Labs repository maintained by one or more community members. If there is a process or open discussion we need to have, we hold the discussion in an open forum on the community repo through issues. This combination of a simple goal and open discussion has been effective and has resulted in a revitalization of some of our most helpful projects.
Starting with Configuration Management
The work on Riak Labs is above and beyond the scope of a single set of tools, but it’s good to start with a win. While we’ve discussed the many clients we maintain to empower developers to code in their favorite language, we haven’t mentioned the hard work done to make Ops Engineers happy.
One respected asset in the toolkit of engineers responsible for application deployment is what’s categorized as Configuration Management (CM). While textbook definitions exist, I appreciate the simple goal of CM systems: make application deployments predictable and repeatable.
We at Riak are happy to have community contributors at three of the most highly leveraged CM companies and we’ve recently made an effort to recognize their essential role in Riak’s successful use by developers and operations alike.
Chef Cookbooks
Our community has the good fortune of having Seth Thomas kept the quality of our chef cookbooks up. A quick walkthrough of the recipe shows off Chef’s ruby-esque feel: every Riak parameter you can think of is available as an attribute. For a little more help, see the docs.
Puppet Manifests
Our puppet efforts have had the most drastic turnaround in the last few months. Today, thanks in large part due to Daniel Dreier’s maintainership, we have an up-to-date module that is even Puppet 4.0 complaint and re-written to support 2.x Riak KV deployments.
Ansible Playbooks
While we’re still working on maintainership, the efforts of James Martin and Bryan Hunt has brought our attention to Ansible. We have a solid baseline separated out into the simple common role and the more advanced role that is still in process.
More to Build Together
The ease by which you can configure a Riak environment leveraging any of these configuration management solutions enables developers to focus on coding, not configuration, and provides a great starting point for ops engineers. Riak Labs and its many maintainers make this all possible. By their effort to maintain our community code, they grow in skill and enable thousands of others to do their work well.
If you’re skilled in any of these CM products or others we haven’t mentioned, you’re more than welcome to participate in our communal efforts. Open issues and follow up with a PR. Once we know you’re interested, we’re glad to introduce you to other maintainers and have you join the team.
Happy coding,
Matt
@mjbrender
