Erlang Factory - Building distributed clusters with Riak

Building distributed clusters with Riak

an image Target Audience: Developers and Ops
Prerequisites: Programming skills in any language; understanding of Unix basics
Objectives:
* Installing and building a local Riak cluster
* Leaning the operational basics of Riak
* Using the various Riak APIs and Query Mechanisms
* Understanding and exercising Riak's built-in scalability and fault tolerance
* Analyzing and the numerous use cases for Riak
* Benchmarking, Troubleshooting, and Running Riak in production
Goal: Learn why Riak is the best open source database you will ever run in production
Duration: Three days.
Registration: 8:30 on 18 March 2013.
Venue: Marines' Memorial Club and Hotel in Union Square.
Description: Riak is an open source, scalable database being used by companies like Comcast, Boeing, Voxer, Yammer, GitHub, and Joyent today. Riak is built from the ground up to be fault-tolerant to operational failures. It also has various APIs and query mechanisms that are flexible and purpose-built to make developers' lives easier. This class will be a top-to-bottom review of Riak, and attendees will leave with a firm understanding of why it's the best open source database you will ever run in production.

Course Contents:

Course Contents
What is Riak?
Getting Started
Basic Querying
Riak Architecture
Advanced Querying
Operating Riak
How to Scale
Benchmarking
Building an Application

What is Riak?
Overview of Riak’s available features and a discussion of the advantages of choosing Riak for your data storage needs.

Getting Started
This section will discuss how to install Riak and build a cluster. Attendees will install and setup a cluster on their own machines.

Basic Querying
An overview of the basic key-value querying mechanisms will be reviewed. Participants will store and retrieve data from Riak clusters on their own machines.

Riak Architecture
An architectural overview of Riak will be presented. Learn how Erlang and OTP design principles empower Riak’s core characteristics of fault-tolerance, operational ease, and scalability.

Advanced Querying
Discover the advanced query mechanisms which go beyond simple key look-up. This section will cover Link Walking, Riak Search, and Secondary Indexes.

Operating Riak
Learn how to configure, operate, and monitor a Riak cluster. Participants will learn how to tune a Riak cluster and troubleshoot various issues.

How to Scale
A discussion of how Riak makes it easy to scale out (and back in) applications.

Benchmarking
Learn how to benchmark Riak using Basho Bench.

Building an Application
Learn about various data modeling strategies and spend the day building a non-trivial application on top of Riak.

Teacher(s):

Casey Rosenthal

Casey Rosenthal is currently Director of Training at Basho, where he installs and tests Riak clusters, and trains clients so that they can do the same. As Chief Software Engineer for Port Forty Nine, Casey worked for NASA, Caltech, and JPL to engineer systems for storing and disseminating the image archives of space telescopes such as Hubble, Spitzer, Chandra, etc. He came in 4th place at the BotPrize 2K competition in Copenhagen for Discordia, a software bot written in jRuby that plays Unreal Tournament like a human based on a new artificial intelligence algorithm. He created RubyGames, a learner-centered Ruby facilitation for groups, and ran it throughout user groups in New England in '09 and '10, and brought it to a warm reception at the New York Ruby Meetup in '11 where he was an Assistant Director for the user group. Casey was an Expert Panel Judge for the '09 RailsRumble, and competed in the '10 RailsRumble. He won a seed grant from the Maine Institute of Technology to commercialize a discrete event simulation framework written in Ruby.