May 1, 2013
This post looks at five commonly asked questions about Riak CS Riak S2 – simple, available, open source storage built on top of Riak. For more information, please review our full documentation, or sign up for an intro to Riak CS webcast on Friday, May 10.
What is the relationship between Riak and Riak CS?
Riak CS is built on top of Riak, exposing higher-level storage functions including large object support, an S3-compatible API, multi-tenancy, and per-user storage and access statistics. Riak itself provides the replication, availability, fault-tolerance, and underlying storage functions for the Riak CS implementation. Riak and Riak S2 should both be installed on every node in your cluster. While Riak and Riak CS Riak S2 could be run on separate virtual or physical nodes, running them on the same machine minimizes intra-cluster bandwidth usage and is the recommended approach. As with Riak, we advise a minimum 5-node cluster.
When objects are uploaded to Riak CS, the object is broken up into smaller chunks which are then streamed, stored, and replicated in the underlying cluster. A manifest is maintained for each object, that points to which blocks comprise the object, and is used to retrieve all blocks and present them to the client on read. In addition to running Riak and Riak CS on each node, Stanchion, a request serializer, must be installed on at least one node in the cluster. This ensures that global entities, such as users and buckets, are unique in the system.
What use cases does Riak CS support that Riak doesn’t?
Riak CS has several features that are not provided in the standalone Riak database. One of the most obvious differences is in the size of objects supported. Riak S2 exposes large object support, and includes multi-part upload so you can upload objects as a series of parts. This allows you to upload single objects to the system into the terabyte range. In Riak, the data model is simply key/value; in Riak S2, the key/value model provides the underlying structure for higher-level storage semantics – users, buckets and objects. The Riak CS interface is an S3-compatible HTTP API, allowing you to use existing S3 libraries and tools. In contrast, Riak exposes an HTTP and protobufs API and offers many language-specific clients. Unlike Riak, Riak CS is multi-tenant, with the concept of “users” and per-user reporting on storage and access. This makes it a fit for both private cloud scenarios, with multiple internal users, or as a foundation for a public cloud storage offering.
How does multi-tenancy, authentication and reporting work?
Riak CS exposes an interface for user creation, disablement and credential management. Riak S2 can be set so that only administrators can create new users. Administrators also have special privileges including being able to retrieve a list of all users in the system and query the user account information of any user. Once issued credentials, users are able to authenticate, create buckets, upload and download files, retrieve account information, obtain new credentials, or disable their account through the API. Riak CS supports the standard S3 authentication scheme, with support for header and query string authorization.
Riak CS exposes storage, usage and network statistics that support use cases like accounting, subscription, billing or multi-group utilization for public or private clouds. Riak CS will report information on how much storage a user is consuming and the network operations related to access. This data is exposed via an HTTP interface and can be queried on the default timespan “now” or as a range from start time through end time. Access statistics are reported as bytes in and bytes out for both object and bucket operations. Reporting of this information can be scheduled for a set interval or manually triggered.
What’s the difference between Riak CS and Riak CS Enterprise?
Riak CS Enterprise provides multi-datacenter replication on top of Riak CS. For multi-datacenter replication in Riak CS, global information for users, bucket information and manifests are streamed in real-time from a primary implementation to a secondary site so global state is maintained across locations. Objects can then be replicated in either full sync or real-time sync mode. The secondary site will replicate the object as in normal operations. Additional datacenters can be added in order to create availability zones or provide additional data redundancy and locality. Riak CS Enterprise can also be configured for bi-directional replication. Riak CS Enterprise also comes with 24/7, enterprise-level support. More information and pricing can be found here, and full technical information is available on our docs portal. Ready to get started? Sign up for a developer trial of Riak CS Enterprise.
What are your plans for integration of Riak CS with open source compute solutions?
Riak CS provides highly available, distributed storage, making it a natural fit for usage alongside compute solutions. We have partnered with Citrix to collaborate on the integration of Apache CloudStack and Riak CS to create a complete cloud software offering that combines compute and storage in an integrated platform. For more information on our partnership with CloudStack, check out this blog post with the latest update. API and authentication support for OpenStack is also in progress.
Ready to get started? You can download Riak CS here, and check out the Riak CS Fast Track for a hands-on getting started guide.
