Basho open sources Riak CS

Basho has announced that it has open sourced Riak CS, an S3-compatible object storage system based on the already open source Riak distributed database. Riak CS builds on Riak's high availability, scalability and fault tolerance and adds the S3 API and authentication mechanisms to allow it to be deployed within private or public clouds as a reliable storage platform. A Riak CS storage cloud can support multiple tenants with per-user level reporting and supports large binary object storage making it suitable for many demanding archival tasks.

The open source release of Riak CS includes a number of new features. To allow for more easily manageable and resumable uploads of very large files, Riak CS now supports multi-part uploads with part sizes ranging from 5MB to 5GB, though 5GB is also the maximum size of an object.

With very large files, it is often useful to be able to retrieve just part of that file and Riak CS now supports this capability by supporting the Range request header of HTTP GET methods. For better control of access, Riak CS storage buckets can be restricted to only being accessed by particular client IP addresses. Riak CS Control, a web administration tool for user management, has also been open sourced and is available on GitHub.

Basho says that users who need to replicate data between multiple data centres, for resilience and global performance, or who need enterprise level support should look at their commercial offering, Riak CS Enterprise. The open source version of Riak CS is licensed under an Apache 2 License in the same way that Riak is. Source code and binaries can be downloaded from Basho's site. API documentation compares the Riak CS functionality with the Amazon S3 REST API; other documentation details how to install and deploy it.

(djwm)