Erlang has been my latest hobby language, and while I'm not very deep into it yet I'm having fun looking through the source code here to see what "real Erlang" looks like.
This is excellent news. Questions though...does Riak CS need its own dedicated Riak cluster or can you use "its" Riak nodes directly in the usual Riak fashion? If so, is it possible to access the CS-created chunks directly? (Not saying that is a good idea...just trying to understand how Riak and Riak CS fit together.)
Riak provides key-value services for Riak CS, and there's nothing stopping you from configuring the same Riak cluster for both the Riak CS application and another application.
Riak CS doesn't use any Riak functionality you can't use yourself, so accessing Riak CS-created chunks is easy because that's what Riak CS itself does. The source for how this works is at https://github.com/basho/riak_cs/tree/develop/src in case you want to play and have fun with that.
This is true, but Riak CS has special configuration requirements for the backing Riak cluster that might make it not the best choice for combining with your typical Riak applications.
Mildly-shameless plug here: Riak CS will a big topic at RICON EAST this May in New York City (in addition to Riak and other distributed systems goodness). You should all attend.
In a sense, yes. Luwak was just basically plain-old Riak with some support for huge files. CS is a full solution for storing large assets, along with multitenancy, role management, reporting, monitoring and pretty much anything else you'd expect from a cloud store like S3.
https://github.com/basho/riak_cs
If any experts happen to notice particularly good or heinous examples in this source code, it'd be interesting to point them out.