This document provides an introduction to Riak and Ripple. It summarizes that Riak is a distributed key-value store inspired by Amazon Dynamo that allows scaling by adding more machines. It stores data in buckets and uses JavaScript for MapReduce functions. The document demonstrates basic usage of the Riak client and RObject in Ruby, and explains how links enable lightweight relationships between objects and can be traversed through link walking. It also provides an example of a MapReduce function in JavaScript.