Amazon S3 clone open-sourced by Riak devs by Elliot Bentley.
From the post:
The developers of NoSQL database Riak have open-sourced their new project, an Amazon S3 clone called Riak CS.
In development for a year, Riak CS provides highly-available, fault-tolerant storage able to manage files as large as 5GB, with an API and authentication system compatible with Amazon S3. In addition, today’s open-source release introduces multipart upload and a new web-based admin tool.
Riak CS is built on top of Basho’s flagship product Riak, a decentralised key/value store NoSQL database. Riak was also based on an existing Amazon creation – in this case, Dynamo, which also served as the inspiration for Apache Cassandra.
In December’s issue of JAX Magazine, Basho EMEA boss Matt Heitzenroder (who has since left the company) explained that Riak CS was initially conceived as an exercise in “dogfooding” their own database product. “It was a goal of engineers to gain insight into use cases themselves and also to have something we can go out there and sell,” he said.
See also: The Riak CS Fast Track.
You may have noticed that files stored on/in (?) clouds are just like files on your local hard drive.
They can be copied, downloaded, pipelined, subjected to ETL, processed and transferred.
The cloud of your choice provides access to greater computing power and storage than before, but that’s a different of degree, not in kind.
A difference in kind would be the ability to find and re-use data based upon its semantics and not on happenstance of file or field names.
Riak CS isn’t that cloud today but in the competition to be the cloud of tomorrow, who knows?