August 13, 2013
The release of Riak CS 1.4, Riak’s open source cloud storage software, adds a number of performance improvements as well as OpenStack integration and simpler user management. Riak CS is being used by companies all over the world to build public and private clouds, and as reliable storage to power various applications.
One of the biggest additions with Riak CS 1.4 is the integration with OpenStack, broadening our relationship with the open source community. This integration supports OpenStack’s Keystone authentication service and the OpenStack Object Storage API, which allows OpenStack users the means to integrate Riak CS for object storage in an OpenStack deployment.
The Riak CS Users API provides an interface for user creation and management. This release also improves this API to give operators greater flexibility in managing user information. Additionally, this release benefits from ongoing refactoring and reorganization efforts aimed at improving the agility and responsiveness of Riak CS.
Riak CS 1.4 takes advantage of some changes made in Riak 1.4 to provide performance improvements to Riak CS users. First, Riak CS 1.4 features improved performance of listing the contents of large buckets by taking advantage of secondary index pagination in Riak. Riak CS 1.4 also leverages a new option for object block retrieval, which decreases intracluster bandwidth by 67%. This improves the download performance when handling many concurrent requests. These features can be independently enabled, but are disabled by default to accommodate users not using Riak 1.4 with Riak CS. See the documentation for more details.
Riak CS Enterprise is the commercial extension of Riak CS, which adds multi-datacenter replication and 24/7 support. The 1.4 release improves replication performance by increasing storage efficiencies and adding multiple TCP connections between clusters.
In addition to the features and upgrades listed above, many bugs were harmed in the making of this release. For a full list of what is included in Riak CS 1.4, check out our code at Github.com/basho or review the release notes. To learn even more, join our live webcast, “What’s New in Riak CS 1.4” on August 23rd.
