August 2020 Summaries

Adobe's Digital Economy Index report provides insights into eCommerce trends, with key findings including a significant shift in US consumers' shopping habits online, with $77B extra spent during the pandemic period, and online spending tracking above holiday levels. The index highlights the importance of customer experience and personalization, citing factors such as custom catalog search and real-time recommendations. It also emphasizes the need for companies to adapt to changing demand and supply patterns, with those having a fast data layer being the winners in providing personalized experiences and accurate product information. To succeed in eCommerce, Adobe recommends providing in-the-moment personalization, developing in-depth customer profiles, and gleaning real-time insights from data silos and clouds.

The 2020 Update from 451 Research highlights some elements of CX trends that will drive success or lead to failure. Data and analytics play a crucial role in differentiating digital leaders from laggards, with the top three areas being insights about customer behavior, omni-channel optimization for individual customers, and identifying key moments of influence. Businesses must understand and optimize payment experiences as "bankless" transactions increase due to the pandemic. Top performers have faster checkout processes, accept more payment methods and currencies, and utilize IP recognition technology and mobile optimization. The shift towards subscription and direct-to-consumer models is also accelerating. Forrester's recent survey emphasizes that businesses should aspire to provide effectiveness, ease, and emotion in their customer experience.

The Aerospike Standup newsletter provides updates on blog posts, community questions, documentation, releases, and events. In this volume, the team prepares for Kafka Summit with updates to v5.1, Prometheus Exporter, and Kafka Connector. They also discuss XDR in a new article and engage in a forum conversation about high availability vs. strong consistency. Subscribers receive updates every other week, and upcoming events include a sponsored session on distributed data storage and streaming for real-time decisioning using Kafka, Spark, and Aerospike on August 24th at 11:30 AM PDT and a webinar on Enterprise Database Strategies for 2020 on August 27th at 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET.

The Aerospike Standup is a newsletter written by developers for developers, featuring blog posts, community questions, documentation, releases, and events from the Aerospike team. The latest volume includes updates to v5.1 and new features in the Prometheus Exporter and Kafka Connector. Community members have also asked about high availability vs. strong consistency, while the team is preparing to present at the Kafka Summit and has upcoming events and releases scheduled for August.

The text discusses the integration of Aerospike and Apache Kafka® in modern data architectures. It highlights that Aerospike Connect for Kafka enables bi-directional exchange of data between Aerospike and transactional systems at the edge and core. The two connectors included are Inbound, which streams data from Kafka into an Aerospike database, and Outbound, which updates Kafka with records from an Aerospike database. The text also mentions that Aerospike supports various message formats and can be accessed via a REST Client. Additionally, it announces the sponsorship of Kafka Summit 2020 by Aerospike in partnership with Confluent, where Kiran Matty will deliver a talk on Distributed Data Storage & Streaming for Real-time Decisioning using Kafka, Spark and Aerospike.

The first half of 2020 was marked by resilience and determination from the Aerospike team, who successfully organized a Virtual Summit in May that attracted nearly 900 attendees worldwide. Alongside sharing stories and lessons learned, the event raised funds and awareness for World Central Kitchen and International Medical Corps, two organizations helping those affected by COVID-19. With support from partners Intel and HPE, as well as attendees of the Aerospike Virtual Summit, over $15,000 was raised for these two organizations.

Data is an essential part of enterprise-level strategy today and its scale and distribution significantly impact businesses' ability to run operations and serve customers' needs. Experts have gathered insights on understanding data, its characteristics, and tips for adopting a globally distributed data system. The adoption of globally distributed databases requires professionals to think globally while processing locally, develop for the cloud rather than a specific vendor, and prioritize data over technology. Aerospike's platform provides high-performance intracloud and intercloud cross-datacenter replication, enabling seamless operations in various industries such as finance, banking, and advertising.

The growing interconnectedness of the world has led to an increased need for global applications, with users accessing them from anywhere in the country or the world. To provide a better user experience, proximity and availability of data are key requirements. Aerospike 5.0 offers two solutions to meet these needs: Multi-site Cluster and Cross-datacenter replication (XDR). XDR has been completely redesigned for better functionality and flexibility in version 5.0, allowing multiple individual clusters connected via XDR to replicate data asynchronously after a write transaction completes at the originating cluster. The new capabilities enhance ease, control, and flexibility in managing data from multiple sources and sent to multiple destinations.

The Aerospike Standup Vol. 10 newsletter focuses on the release of v5.1 and includes various articles, questions from the community, documentation updates, and upcoming events. Key points include security enhancements in v5.1, integration with HashiCorp Vault, authentication and authorization using Aerospike REST Client, Aerospike on EKS (AWS K8s), Ansible for Aerospike, release notes for C#, Rust clients, new/updated documentation, and upcoming events such as a sponsored session on Distributed Data Storage & Streaming for Real-time Decisioning using Kafka, Spark, and Aerospike.

Happy August! We’re happy to have everyone on this edition of the Aerospike Standup, a newsletter written by developers for developers. As always you will find here blog posts, questions from the community, documentation, releases and events, written by the Aerospike team. This volume we’re celebrating the release of v5.1! Questions From the Community New Articles Aerospike Database 5.1: Security Enhancements including HashiCorp Vault Integration, Paul Jensen VP of Engineering Operations, Aerospike Authentication and Authorization using Aerospike REST Gateway, Eugene R. Aerospike on EKS (AWS K8s), dev.to, Ken Tune, Solution Architect, Aerospike Ansible for Aerospike, dev.to, Ken Tune, Solution Architect, Aerospike New/Updated Documentation New or changed XDR configuration parameters and metrics period-ms governs the length of cycling through the XDR transaction queue. write-policy is one of auto (default), update, or replace. compression-level controls the amount of compression applied to data-in-transit to remote destinations. sc-replication-wait-ms is the time to wait between replications in the transaction queue to allow client writes to finish actual replication when Strong Consistency is enabled. retry_no_node metric tracks when a node at the destination cannot be found. Other configuration parameter changes Default for parameter proto-fd-idle-ms is now 0. New parameter microsecond-histograms allows finer granularity on histograms. Upcoming Events Kafka Summit 2020 - Sponsored Session - Distributed Data Storage & Streaming for Real-time Decisioning using Kafka, Spark and Aerospike. Aug 24, 11:30AM PDT Enterprise Database Strategies for 2020 - An Examination of IT Data Management Trends and How the Industry Responds, Webinar: Live online Aug 27, 2020, 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET