Between 12th and 13th of October bet365 hosted the first post-Basho RIAK developer workshop. Over the two days, the international RIAK community came together at bet365 House to discuss, the current situation, ongoing development work, and to shape the initial development roadmap. What follows is a brief summary of the two days and the outcomes.

Martin Davies, Hillside Technology Limited’s CEO, opened the workshop, discussing bet365’s RIAK involvement and history. Martin explained how RIAK has shaped the development of the bet365 platform over recent years. Martin also discussed the reasoning behind bet365’s purchase of the RIAK IPR from Basho’s receiver.

From here discussions began in earnest starting with the current state of the RIAK codebase, with the immediate goal of releasing a known good build as soon as possible. It was quickly decided all code would be released under the Apache 2 license. This lead to the first issue; the inclusion of a GPL licensed HyperLogLog dependency. It was decided to contact the HLL developers to aid in the dependency and GPL removal.

To limit the support and development fallout, bet365 committed to the upkeep of the existing Basho / RIAK domains and file storage.

As RIAK version 2.2.3 has been used as the stable foundation for a number of NHS developments, it was decided this version would be targeted as a baseline.

Russell Brown detailed his work to secure a repeatable robust RIAK build. Russell explained the cleaning up of the test suite, and ensuring a successful ‘make test’. Now this has been completed, Russell is moving onto ‘riak test’ and QuickCheck. The work is expected to be complete in short order. It was agreed those with QuickCheck licenses would be assigned commit rights to ensure once we have a stable build it remains.

Conversations were had around the open RIAK bugs. All agreed the tickets would be triaged, and appropriately dealt with.

It was agreed the RIAK documentation is lacking. The correctness and coverage of the documentation will be addressed.

Yokozuna search was discussed. The consensus was to retain Solr integration for now to support existing users.

It was agreed the first release would be version 2.2.5. It was slated this version will include, pending RIAK PRs, a number of NHS enhancements along with bet365 fixes. The contents of the release will be discussed and agreed during a workshop to be held at the end of November. It is planned to complete the 2.2.5 release in December 2017. The details of the 2.2.5 release one day workshop will be announced in the next few weeks.

bet365 committed to executing load testing and publishing the results for RIAK releases going forward.

End of life was considered. It was agreed version 2.0.x would be supported as an upgrade stepping stone. Existing users should look to upgrade to version 2.0.x, and all future developments will retain backwards compatibility to 2.0.x.

RIAK version 3.0.x was discussed. Two workshops will be held early 2018 to discuss RIAK Replication and Indexing. These features along with numerous in-flight NHS sponsored enhancements will be included in 3.0.x. RIAK 3.0.x will be released summer 2018. Workshop details will be announced after the 2.2.5 release.

We’d like to thank everyone involved in making the workshop a success.

Full video of the workshop can be found here.