[madworld]

What they are doing with Riak isn't sharding. Riak from the ground up was been designed as a distributed database. They didn't want to go horizontal when really they shouldn't have to with their datasize based on Mongo's claims. The problem is, Mongo lies about what their database can do, and the fact that Kiip figured that out is why they didn't want to bother scaling out with mongo as a band-aid for its problems. It was better for them to just use something made to scale. That's how I read it, based on that blog and by his comments on this post.