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engelsanchez edited this page Feb 15, 2013 · 32 revisions

Riak Core

Riak Core is the framework upon which Riak, Basho's distributed Key/Value datastore, is built. This Wiki is meant to help you understand the riak core and its source code.

Contents

Dependencies

For an up to date list of the applications that riak_core depends on, see the rebar configuration file

Main concepts

Ring

Partitioning scheme used to divide responsibility across. The number of partitions in the ring is decided at installation time and stays fixed. There is current work being done to allow it to change.

Virtual nodes

Each virtual node (or vnode) is a worker responsible for a given partition in the ring. A riak_core node will host any number of vnodes, depending on the size of the ring and the number of nodes in the cluster. Basically, around (size of ring) / (number of nodes). What vnodes do will vary per application. In general, they handle commands that need to be executed for the partition they own. See more about their API in the vnode page

Buckets

Buckets are nothing but namespaces with configuration properties. Your application may use only one, or whatever number works best.

Handoffs

Ownership of a partition may be transferred from one virtual node to another under certain failure scenarios to guarantee high availability. If a node goes down unexpectedly, the partitions owned by the virtual nodes it contained will be temporarily handled by virtual nodes in other physical nodes. If the original node comes back up, ownership will eventually be transferred back to the original owners, also called primary virtual nodes. The virtual nodes that took over ownership in that scenario are called secondary virtual nodes. The process by which this ownership is negotiated and any relevant data is transferred to accomplish that is what we call a handoff. Transfer of ownership may also occur when adding or removing physical nodes to the cluster. See all the gory details in the handoff page

Supervisor hierarchy

At the top, we have the riak_core_sup module. Underneath that supervisor, we have the following process hierarchy:

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