Riak is a distributed data store with several additions to improve upon the standard key-value lookups, like specifying replication values. Since values in Riak are opaque, many of these methods either require custom code to extract and give meaning to values, such as MapReducem or allow for header metadata to provide an added descriptive dimension to the object, such as secondary indexes or search.
Next, we'll peek further under the hood and show you how to set up and manage a cluster of your own.