January 2022 Summaries

Aerospike Standup is a developer-focused newsletter that compiles blog posts, community queries, documentation, and updates from the Aerospike team, featuring new articles, knowledge base entries, and release notes. It addresses community questions such as error handling in C clients, performance issues with backups, and module errors in Java clients. The newsletter also introduces new features in the Aerospike Admin Tool and provides solutions for issues like moving XDR traffic and handling client errors. Recent release notes cover updates to various clients and tools, including the Document API, Java Object Mapper, and Python Client, with detailed version histories for the C#, C, and Java clients.

Significant changes are underway in the payments industry due to technology advancements, customer demand and business initiatives such as open banking and ISO 20022. These developments provide financial institutions with revenue opportunities by enabling better-quality data and improved customer experiences. The international standard for financial communications and data exchanges, ISO 20022, offers benefits like faster, more reliable, secure payments at a lower cost due to enhanced interoperability and elimination of different standards from various countries and financial institutions. Open banking, also known as PSD2 Second Payment Services Directive, requires the United Kingdom's largest banks to release their data in a standardized format, allowing for improved customer experiences through account aggregation services like Intuit's Mint. Financial institutions can leverage these changes by implementing strategic infrastructure and application systems that support ISO 20022 capabilities, offering global payment solutions, and improving clearing/settlement of securities processes. To capitalize on these opportunities, financial institutions must have a real-time data platform and ensure compliance with local data regulations.

ISO 20022 is a widely adopted international standard for financial communications and data exchanges between financial institutions and payment systems. It provides a common language, improving the quality of data shared about customers, enabling better customer experiences, faster payments, more reliability, security, and cost savings. Open banking, also known as PSD2 Second Payment Services Directive, requires banks to release their data in a standardized format, allowing for data sharing among institutions and third-party aggregators like Intuit's Mint. This enables account aggregation, global payments, clearing/settlement of securities, and real-time data platforms, providing numerous revenue opportunities for financial institutions. Implementing ISO 20022 is not easy, but it can be achieved strategically by adapting infrastructure and application systems to create an architecture with ISO 20022 capabilities. The adoption of ISO 20022 and open banking presents opportunities for financial institutions to improve customer experiences, gain valuable data, and deliver better services, but also requires a right data platform and understanding of local compliance demands.

Aerospike Admin (asadm) has been expanded with several useful features to make it a comprehensive command-line tool for monitoring and administering an Aerospike Database. Notable additions include Dynamic Configuration, Roster Management, Truncation, and Job Management. The Dynamic Configuration feature allows users to change configuration parameters and logging levels, create and delete XDR datacenters, add/remove nodes from datacenters, and add/remove namespaces from datacenters. Roster Management simplifies the process of adding or removing nodes from the pending roster and setting the pending roster to equal the observed nodes list. Truncation allows users to truncate namespaces and sets, as well as undo in-progress truncations. Job Management has been moved from aql to asadm, with two new commands: show jobs and manage jobs. These enhancements aim to make cluster management easier for Aerospike customers.

The Aerospike Admin tool has been expanded with new features in recent releases, including dynamic configuration with tab-completion, namespace and set truncation, roster management, and job management. The manage config command allows users to change configuration parameters and logging levels, create and delete XDR datacenters, add/remove nodes from datacenters, and add/remove namespaces from datacenters. Tab-completion for the manage config command provides a way to quickly change configuration settings without having to memorize all possible options. The new manage truncate command allows users to truncate namespaces and sets, record truncation with a last-update-time (LUT) before a given date, and undo in-progress truncations. Roster management has been added, allowing users to add/remove nodes from the pending roster and set the pending roster to equal the observed nodes list. The new manage jobs command allows users to view and kill scan jobs, making it easier to manage cluster jobs. These new features aim to make Aerospike Admin a more powerful and user-friendly tool for managing Aerospike databases.