[macintux]

We were working on ways of making it easier (such as CRDTs to reduce the amount of work developers had to do to leverage eventual consistency), but these were pretty challenging problems to solve.

One of our biggest disappointments: we had plans to add a way to enforce strong consistency leveraging (IIRC) something akin to multi-paxos, but couldn't get it to work.

[jtuple]

TBH, we shipped fully working strong consistency in 2014. It just had a limited feature set, was disabled by default, and was never promoted/marketed since it didn't fit the direction the new CEO/CTO was pushing.

The engineering exodus around that time sorta killed the project though, and we never were able to do the big follow-up work to make it really shine.

(Disclaimer: Former Basho Principal Engineer, primary author of strong consistency work, lead riak_core dev from 2011-2015)

I think another 18 months would have been enough too. But it just wasn't the right environment after the hostile take-over / leadership transition.

[NickM]

There were customers happily using strong consistency in production, but somehow the idea that it wasn’t “finished” kept getting repeated over and over by management. I was well on my way to solving the biggest rough edge (tombstone reaping in SC buckets) but then I got pulled off to work on the infamous “data platform” and never got to finish that work :-(

[masleeds]

I'm not sure though for how much longer it will continue to make sense for the project as-is to continue to roll riak_ensemble forward as part of future releases. As there are no contributors who have direct direct experience or knowledge of using it in production, so it is hard to claim it as being a supported part of the product in any real sense.

I apologise if we do eventually cut it. Having worked through the code when chasing unstable tests, I developed an appreciation for the quality of the work.

[binary132]

If you don’t mind my asking, how did you find working with Erlang in such a context? I’ve always been curious about it, but these days it seems like most people are mostly interested in Elixir for REST APIs and I am content with my existing tools for that purpose. However, there are clearly places where OTP and other Erlang functionality would shine and I’ve always thought it might be fun to keep in my back pocket.

[macintux]

My apologies for misremembering. I’m glad you chimed in to correct the record.

[binary132]

that sounds like a painful session