Riak is designed to bestow a range of real-world benefits, but equally, to handle the fallout of wielding such power. Consistent hashing and vnodes are an elegant solution to horizontally scaling across servers. N/R/W allows you to dance with the CAP theorem by fine-tuning against its constraints. And vector clocks allow another step closer to consistency by allowing you to manage conflicts that will occur at high load.
We'll cover other technical concepts as needed, including the gossip protocol, hinted handoff, and read-repair.
Next we'll review Riak from the user (developer) perspective. We'll check out lookups, take advantage of write hooks, and examine alternative query options like secondary indexing, search, and MapReduce.