Otherwise, it's nice to see S3 becoming a web storage standard (or one standard emerging in general). Openstack Swift also supports it.
At its core, S3 is a key-value store and I don't think it's a very feature-full one at that. Indeed it has some very good features but I'm afraid people simply implement its API rather than spend time innovating.
Two things that I have in mind: - Retention delay - REST API (although both Swift and RiakCS implement that)
I'm sure I've overlooked a few, but the ones I'm aware of (roughly in chronological order of when they first became usable) are:
Eucalyptus's Walrus http://open.eucalyptus.com/wiki/EucalyptusStorage_v1.4
OpenStack's Swift http://swift.openstack.org/
SpiderOak's Nimbus.io https://nimbus.io/
Basho's Riak CS http://basho.com/products/riakcs/
Glad to see so much interest in this space.
I think Basho made a good strategic choice with what they call "Per-Tenant Visibility", which will facilitate other cloud hosting providers that compete with Amazon reselling Riak CS as a storage service.
Yeah, OpenStack has that as well, from my understanding. I'm trying to figure out the other differences between the two.
Nimbus.io is AGPL, Swift is Apache, Walrus is either GPLv3 or BSD.
http://devblog.seomoz.org/2011/10/using-riak-for-ranking-col...
I know of a couple other ruby shops that use riak. Github uses it a bit. Spreedly uses it as well.
Postgres is a better fit for most Ruby web applications. When you first launch your app, you'll have a tiny handful of users and won't have any problems fitting it in a free Heroku instance on the free 5MB shared Postgres, and the compromises you'd have to make with your data model to fit a database like Riak aren't going to pay off until you get enormous. Postgres and ActiveRecord get the job done quickly and without fuss, and allow you to launch quickly and see how your app is received.
You can always scale later: https://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch04_Scale_Later.php
Riak has a tunable consistency model, and there are a lot less applications that need tunable consistency compared with those that need the strengths of the SQL databases (everyone knows them, they just work) or MongoDB (designed from the ground up to be a developer friendly document database).
The closest Riak competitor is probably Cassandra (in terms of technical attributes), and you don't see huge numbers of Ruby apps using Cassandra either.
http://wiki.basho.com/Riak-Comparisons.html is worth reading.
And is your problem with the quantity of dollars, or with the fact that they charge at all?
Yes
> And is your problem with the quantity of dollars, or with the fact that they charge at all?
Quantity, in particular how much they charge per server. I don't think it would be fair for basho for me to spout specifics, but as late of last year it seemed rather exorbitant especially for an open source product.
This is the main reason my large employer didn't even bother to seriously look at what their products had to offer. Both 10gen (Mongodb) and one of the companies offering Cassandra support contracts were a lot more reasonable.
Parts of it may well be open sourced over time.
When we contacted both 10gen and Basho a few months ago, Basho's support rates were cheaper than 10gen. We didn't look at Datastax at the time, so I can't comment on that comparison.