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michaelbuckbee

I haven't been following this, but from what I can gather:

- They raised $60mil (the last round being a Series G for $25mil!)

- They're being sold for what I can only this is a pittance / acquihire by Bet365

- Bet365 is buying them because they're heavily invested in Riak internally

- They're open sourcing the code (likely because they need help)

I'm not trying to disparage anyone here, but this makes my blood run cold.

Is Riak so critical to Bet365 that the right move was to _buy the company_ versus switching to a different storage system?

Is there a NoSQL vendor that's doing well out there?

Should we all just be using Postgres anyway?

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> They're open sourcing the code (likely because they need help)

Unlikely. I genuinely believe Martin Davies is doing it as a service to the Erlang community. bet365 doesn't need to open source anything. They've got deep enough pockets to hire developers to maintain Riak internally for the foreseeable future.

> Is Riak so critical to Bet365 that the right move was to _buy the company_ versus switching to a different storage system?

Yes. There isn't a storage system readily available which offers the same capabilities as Riak. At the scale at which bet365 operates, doing so in a gradual fashion takes years. By capabilities I mean the ability to make different tradeoffs in different use cases. Riak has a nice set of levers to tradeoff consistency for availability. Its built in support for CRDTs is quite amazing.

We use a huge amount of RIAK at bet365, and prior to the IP acquisition had secured the rights to the enterprise code. We have a large development team and are already working on enhancements. Securing the IP, and the subsequent opening of the code allows us, and any other enterprise users in a similar position, to release code for the good of the wider community.

> Is Riak so critical to Bet365 that the right move was to _buy the company_ versus switching to a different storage system?

Quite possibly, yes. Data has incredible inertia. Not only because of the storage system used, but also all of the years of ops tooling, application integration, etc. that surrounds it. I don't know anything about Bet 365, but if they had any non-trivial amount of their business data locked up in Riak then from a cost/risk analysis they may have decided that purchasing the company was the safest and cheapest option to protect their own company.

And besides the natural lock-in that comes with investing in a DB, Riak may just be that much better than the other options at what it does.

I thought data had gravity.

For those not in on the joke, "Data Gravity" is a concept proposed by Basho's former CTO: https://datagravity.org/

This is not an acquihire. A lot of developers were already let go quite some time ago from Basho.

Then what was it? Genuinely curious what happened here...

From that post, it sounds like an asset acquisition. In other words, they bought IP: source code and any related rights.

The note mentions a receiver, which means the company is being liquidated by a court, which implies that it's effectively (though not technically) bankrupt.

I didn't specifically ask, but from what I understood they were all gone and this is just assets.

Plus a lot of talented people jumped ship before it sank on account of the management team.

How much does it cost to move to Postgres? How much does it cost to buy the assets?

How much of a halo do you get from writing a nice post about moving to Postgres? How much of a halo do you get from buying and open sourcing something cool?

I doubt Postgres could handle what Riak's doing. Riak is a Dynamo style database, which basically means that you get zero features but you get something that's fast and scalable. Postgres gives a different set of tradeoffs.

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