Riak is some hot stuff lately with the increasing need for clusterzitation in the world of NoSQL data stores .

Riak is a solution to big data problem, it was based on Amazon Dynamo design, to respond to request at a very large scale,

Basho introduced Riak as fault tolerant, simple, scalable, high availability friendly .

it’s fairly easy to create/add nodes with riak-admin to a riak cluster, but if this is combined with docker-compose capabilities it will give you the possibility to have an easily deployable/scalable cluster of riak nodes.

I created a docker-compose yaml to specify all the components of the cluster, basically a seed and a set of nodes

I used  Hectcastro Riak docker image, because :  that’s the beauty of containers, they are reusable !

• install docker-engine and docker compose
• You can either, copy/past the content of those files or clone this repo :

$git clone https://github.com/mbenachour/riak-cluster-compose.git

$cd riak-cluster-compose

 

• start compose as a daemon :

$docker-compose up -d

• you will have one seed and one node running :

• list all running containers

• let’s create an “Artists” buckets and add an object using node1 (port : 32812)

$curl -i -d '{"name":"Bruce"}' -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
localhost:32812/riak/artists/Bruce

• check the bucket was created :

Scale time ! : 

• to scale you cluster you can add 3 nodes

  $docker scale riak_node=4

•  let’s query node4 for the list of buckets (port: 32818)

works !

if you are more interested to scale on multiple hosts, you can combine this with docker swarm.