Building distributed clusters with Riak

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 26 March 2012.
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.

Dan Reverri

Daniel joined Basho in June 2010 after becoming actively involved in the Basho community. For the year prior to joining Basho he was building applications using many of the tools built by Basho including Rebar, Webmachine, and most importantly Riak. Before that, Daniel worked in the support and services groups of SugarCRM and Parametric Technology Corporation.
Daniel graduated from Boston University in 2004 with a degree in Aerospace Engineering.