Everything is distributed. Any engineer building a system that's running in production needs be aware that she is relying on a series of components, services, and processes that need to work together to deliver data to the customers. This is not easy, and the tools you pick to deploy will impact greatly your ability win users and increase revenue.

Riak is an open source, distributed database being used by companies like Comcast, AT&T, and GitHub in production. Like any database, it comes with a specfic set of tradeoff that make it suitable for a certain set of applications. In this talk, Tom will discuss Riak and the types of applications people are building on it with special attention paid to dealing with latencies in such a distributed system.