Basho and Cisco take the wraps off Riak running on Mesos

The NoSQL database glut: What's the real price of the current boom?

Today's abundance of NoSQL databases gives firms choice with one hand but doles out management complexity with the other, according to Basho CTO Dave McCrory.

Database firm Basho says a new framework created with networking giant Cisco to let NoSQL Riak KV run on the Apache Mesos open-source cluster manager will make big-data services more efficient and increase elasticity.

The idea of the framework, demonstrated today in beta at MesosCon in Seattle, is to automate the datacenter infrastructure beneath instances of the Riak KV distributed database according to demand.

"Pairing Mesos with Riak's own automation and orchestration technology allows enterprise businesses to deploy distributed data services at global scale in support of next generation IoT and big-data applications, while ensuring efficient utilisation of cloud resources," Basho said in a statement.

"By integrating with Mesos, customers no longer need to make guesses about the infrastructure requirements of the Riak nodes as resource management is optimised by Mesos."

With the integration of Riak with Mesos, users will be able to write scripts to automate the scaling of resources for database nodes based on business logic.

The Apache Mesos distributed systems kernel originated as a UC Berkeley research project to pool system resources from physical and virtual machines, making it easier to build and run fault-tolerant and elastically-distributed systems. High-profile users include Airbnb, Apple, eBay and Twitter.

Basho and Cisco take the wraps off Riak running on Mesos

Mesos will automate the datacenter resources running under the Riak KV database, thanks to a framework from Basho and Cisco.

Basho, which created the Riak distributed NoSQL key-value data store, unveiled the 2.1 release in March, with claimed improvements in write performance of between 50 and 150 percent. Prominent users of the database include AT&T, Comcast, GitHub, Best Buy, the UK health service, and The Weather Channel.

Basho CTO Dave McCrory said companies using traditional architectures are struggling to accommodate the need for distributed applications and distributed data services.

"By combining Basho's Riak KV with Mesos, we're able to deliver an easy-to-deploy platform for real-time data processing and thereby enable a new class of modern datacenter developers who can break free of infrastructure restraints and give rise to a whole new class of hyper-scale applications," he said in a statement.

Cisco Intercloud Services CTO Ken Owens said the integration of Riak KV with Mesos would make, "it easier for customers to develop and deploy highly complex, distributed applications".