May 2020 Summaries

The Aerospike Standup is a bi-weekly newsletter for developers, featuring updates on blog posts, community questions, documentation, releases, and events. It's curated by the Aerospike team and aims to provide valuable information for its subscribers. In this issue, new articles are highlighted, including dealing with predicate expression filters in Aerospike REST Client (Part 2) and operations on nested data types in Aerospike. Additionally, release notes from May 14th to May 27th are provided, along with information about upcoming events such as the AI Innovation in Digital Banking Webinar, HPE Discover Virtual Experience, GoWayFest 4.0, and CeFPro Fraud & Financial Crime Europe 2020.

Resolving uncertain transactions in Aerospike is crucial for applications that require strong consistency. Uncertainty can arise due to various failures like client, connection, master, or network issues. To handle such uncertainties, the application must devise a way to query transaction status and implement safe retries. Tagging a write with a unique id using Aerospike's multi-operation "operate" API is recommended for resolving uncertain outcomes. Additionally, implementing "only-once" semantics can ensure exactly-once write execution. Depending on the frequency of updates, uniqueness of update, and other factors, simplifications to this solution may be possible.

Aerospike offers Strong Consistency (SC) mode for applications that require absolute correctness of data. Developers should follow these Twelve Do's of Consistency to ensure optimal performance and reliability: 1. Model your data for single record atomicity. 2. Configure the namespace in SC mode by setting strong-consistency to true. 3. Use the Read-Modify-Write pattern for read-write transactions. 4. Tag a write with a unique id to confirm if a transaction succeeded or failed. 5. Achieve multi-operation atomicity and only-once effect through Operate, predicate expressions, and various policies. 6. Simplify write transactions by making write only-once (idempotent). 7. Record the details for subsequent handling in a batch or manual process if a write's outcome cannot be resolved. 8. Choose the optimal read mode based on performance and staleness guarantees. 9. Use the default value for max-retries (zero) in write-policy. 10. For maximum durability, commit each write to the disk on a per-transaction basis using commit-to-device setting. 11. For exactly-once multi-record (non-atomic) updates use the pattern: record atomically — post at-least-once — process only-once. 12. Resolve in-flight transactions during crash recovery by recording the transaction intent.

You're joining the Aerospike community, a bi-weekly newsletter that provides updates on blog posts, community questions, documentation, releases, and events. The team curates content from various sources, including dev.to and Medium. For specific questions about talks from their virtual summit, you can reach out to the community through Slack or the forum. Recent articles cover topics like Aerospike modeling and operations on nested data types. Upcoming events include webinars, conferences, and a virtual experience for HPE Discover. Release notes are available for various Aerospike components, including server images and Helm charts.

The third annual Aerospike Summit was held virtually last week due to the coronavirus pandemic, attracting viewers from 35 countries and almost quadrupling attendance compared to 2019. The event featured 35 sessions covering new product announcements, hands-on training workshops, and keynotes from customers and partners discussing Aerospike's role in their digital data platforms. Notable speakers included Ray Wang on the post-digital shift, HPE, Intel, Adobe, Schwab, Sony, PayPal, and Aerospike's Founder and Chief Product Officer Srini Srinivasan. The summit highlighted Aerospike's unmatched uptime, predictable performance, scalability, and decreased complexity for mission-critical digital applications.

Our virtual summit was a great success, with 35 talks and over 1000 attendees, and it's now available on demand through the summit platform. The Aerospike v5.0 has been released with new features, including updated documentation to support its usage. The company will be sharing updates every other week, and subscribers can get notifications via email. The community has been engaging with new articles, blogs, and talks, including discussions around active-active capabilities, multi-site clustering, and cloud services. The Aerospike team is also preparing for the cloudy future with a focus on managing risks and solutions in combating fraud and financial crime. Additionally, various upcoming events have been announced, including HPE Discover Virtual Experience and CeFPro Fraud & Financial Crime Europe 2020. The release notes provide detailed information about the recent updates to the Java client, C# client, Connect for Spark, and other related features.

The new digital environment demands applications that are always-on and perform in near real-time. To tackle the challenges of maintaining a global view of business transactions in this distributed realm, Aerospike supports two distinct active-active deployment models - multi-site clustering and cross datacenter replication (XDR). Multi-site clustering uses synchronous replication to deliver a global distributed transaction capability by spanning a single Aerospike cluster across multiple geographically distributed sites. XDR uses asynchronous replication to connect two or more Aerospike clusters located at multiple geographically distributed sites. Both models enable Aerospike to be used in a wide variety of transactional use cases, providing strong consistency, geographic data distribution, elasticity and performance.

Aerospike has released version 5.0 of its database, which includes new features such as multi-site clustering and upgraded Cross Datacenter Replication (XDR). Multi-site clustering allows nodes in a cluster to be geographically distributed while maintaining strong consistency and low-latency reads. XDR has been improved with new options, higher performance, and greater configuration flexibility, making it easier to propagate updates between two or more Aerospike clusters. These features enable new use cases such as globally available systems-of-record and support for distributed financial transactions.

Aerospike offers two active-active deployment models for its database: multi-site clustering and cross-datacenter replication (XDR). Multi-site clustering uses synchronous replication to deliver a global distributed transaction capability, ensuring strong consistency and availability during site failures. However, this scheme results in additional write latencies that can be anywhere from 2 to 100 milliseconds, depending on the distance between sites. In contrast, XDR provides applications with low-latency reads and writes but may compromise on consistency guarantees during site failures. The application's data access patterns must be designed carefully to ensure that concurrent write conflicts do not result in application-level inconsistencies. Both models can work regardless of whether the data is stored in a private cloud, a public cloud, or any combination of both.

Aerospike Virtual Summit '20 is set to commence with a lineup of world-class presentations and speakers. The event, which has attracted more than triple the registrations from last year, will feature leaders discussing business transformation in the digital age. Notable speakers include representatives from Charles Schwab, PayPal, Intel, Virtual Minds, Grab, HP Labs, Google Cloud Platform, Snap, Wayfair, Sony, and Adobe. The summit begins with a keynote on "The Post-Digital Shift" by Ray Wang of Constellation Research. Registration is still open for those interested in attending the event virtually.

The Aerospike Cloud Managed Service aims to provide businesses with a high-performance, scalable database solution that enables agility and high availability in the cloud. It addresses the challenges of traditional databases by offering low latency access, scaling capabilities, and ease of deployment. The managed service includes a team of experienced professionals who work in partnership with customers to ensure optimal implementation and ongoing operational models. Aerospike's approach offers significant cost savings compared to other open-source and commercial database offerings, making it an attractive option for businesses looking to optimize their digital operations.