SAN FRANCISCO, CA — (Marketwired) — 09/05/13 — , a mobile taxi hailing platform, works with distributed NoSQL database, Riak, to power their passenger and driver engine. During Bay to Breakers 2013, San Francisco-s popular marathon, Flywheel saw their highest traffic spikes due to the hundreds of thousands of people trying to get around the city. While their application was experiencing peak loads, Riak ensured that this concurrent usage had no impact on the end-user experience and seamlessly handled this traffic at low-latency with zero downtime.
Flywheel is in more than half of the cabs in San Francisco and has recently expanded to the LA area. Due to their quick growth and need for operational simplicity, Flywheel decided to move their platform to Riak in September of 2012. Riak provided the scale and ease-of use necessary for Flywheel-s small team and beat out many alternative NoSQL databases.
“Bay to Breakers was an important time for us to solidify our place in the mobile taxi market,” said Cuyler Jones, Chief Architect at Flywheel. “Part of why we moved to Riak was to leverage its high availability and scalability, which it achieved perfectly. It was great to have one less thing to worry about during this key event.”
Flywheel-s passenger and driver engine stores information such as user accounts, passenger information, taxi information, and ride details. In addition, Riak is also used to store real-time production data, such as passenger ride requests and ride accepts from drivers.
Basho-s Riak is an open source distributed database designed for always-on availability, fault-tolerance, scalability, and ease-of-use. It is used by companies worldwide that need to always store and access critical data. Mobile is one of the most common use cases for Riak, due to the high availability and low-latency requirements, as well as the need to scale quickly to meet peak loads. For a look at how others use Riak to solve the challenges of mobile applications and services, visit the .
Flywheel is currently running eight nodes in their Riak cluster and handle 25,000-30,000 writes and 50,000-60,000 reads each day. For more information about Flywheel, check out their and download their app. To learn more about Riak, visit .
Basho is a distributed systems company dedicated to making software that is highly available, fault-tolerant and easy-to-operate at scale. Basho-s distributed database, Riak and Basho-s cloud storage software, Riak CS, are used by fast growing Web businesses and by over 25 percent of the Fortune 50 to power their critical Web, mobile and social applications and their public and private cloud platforms.
Riak and Riak CS are available open source. Riak Enterprise and Riak CS Enterprise offer enhanced multi-datacenter replication and 24×7 Basho support. For more information, visit basho.com. Basho is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts and has offices in London, San Francisco, Tokyo and Washington DC.
With offices in San Francisco and Redwood City, Flywheel Software, Inc was founded in 2010 to provide an all-new experience to both passengers and drivers of for-hire vehicles. The Flywheel service includes a mobile app whereby its customers order taxi rides in real-time, track arrival via GPS and automatically pay their fare–all from their smart phone device.
Flywheel-s Investors include Craton Equity Partners of Los Angeles, Shasta Ventures, RockPort Capital, Sand Hill Angels and members of the Band of Angels. Flywheel can be found at
Alex Gutow
Basho Technologies
415-484-6765
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