September 2022 Summaries

The Aerospike Standup has released several new versions of its software, including Aerospike SQL Powered by Starburst 1.1.0 and Aerospike Tools 7.3.1, which support various programming languages such as Java, C#, Python, Go, and C Clients. The releases include many new features, improvements, and bug fixes. Additionally, the company has published blog posts on topics like building large-scale real-time JSON applications and optimizing query performance for JSON documents. Recently, Aerospike attended a meetup event in Austin, Texas, where its founder shared lessons learned from over a decade of experience in scaling data platforms.

Aerospike's Cross Datacenter Replication (XDR) is a highly flexible and efficient feature that enables real-time active-active data replication between geographically separated clusters. In the context of IoT data management, XDR can eliminate dependency between sensor data collection points and data analysis points by allowing dynamic data center addition and configuration. Key features include ease of setup and use, bi-directional filtering capability, and ultra-low latency operation. XDR is particularly useful for mission-critical IoT use cases such as autonomous vehicles, drones, ships, and Federal/DoD segments. It enables real-time data collection at the edge and analysis at the core while maintaining low network costs and high data integrity.

Aerospike's Cross-Datacenter Replication (XDR) is a highly flexible feature that enables real-time active-active data replication between geographically separated clusters, eliminating dependency between sensor data collection points and analysis points. XDR makes data management simple by allowing dynamic addition and configuration of new data centers, record shipping based on Last Update Time, and facilitating data transfer to non-Aerospike data repositories. It is efficient due to fine-grain data control with selective shipment of record components, low latency execution with ultra-low latency operation, and bi-directional filtering capability that saves network costs and enables compliance with global and local data privacy regulatory requirements. XDR also offers proxy and rewind features for configuration in containerized/cloud environments and reliable disaster management. The feature is critical to mission-critical IoT use cases such as autonomous vehicles/drone/ship and Federal/DoD segments, enabling insight generation at the core from real-time data collected at the edge and pushing back that insight to trigger an immediate response. XDR can be deployed over satellite communication links with latency of ~600 milliseconds, making it suitable for scenarios like a cruise ship in the middle of the ocean without terrestrial network connectivity.

Embedded payments, where digital payment options are integrated within a company's app or platform, have gained popularity as they help businesses minimize credit card interchange fees and improve customer experience. Companies like Uber Eats, Starbucks, DocuSign, and McDonald's have adopted this approach to enhance their operations and provide seamless transactions for customers. The advantages of embedded payments include reduced cart abandonment rates, cost savings from not using third-party payment services, better fraud control, and the ability to offer buy now, pay later plans. As more consumers demand a frictionless online buying experience, businesses are expected to increasingly adopt embedded payments in the coming years.

The text discusses the author's decision to join Aerospike, a company that aims to process more data with less infrastructure, reducing costs and environmental impact. It highlights the importance of sustainability in the technology industry and how Aerospike's solutions can help organizations meet their sustainability targets while reducing Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). The author believes these objectives will dominate the next decade and contribute to Aerospike's growth.

Modern marketing and advertising professionals face challenges in keeping up with increasing consumer demands for personalized experiences. To meet this demand, advertisers need to develop and scale an ad tech stack capable of storing terabytes of data about millions of individuals while enabling real-time queries and actions on these profiles. Zeta's omnichannel marketing platform utilizes Aerospike's Real-time Data Platform and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to curate real-time, individualized digital experiences. The ad tech ecosystem is in flux due to recent changes such as GDPR, CCPA, and cookie deprecation, requiring companies to reconsider their targeting strategies and scale them accordingly. Zeta uses Aerospike for flexibility and AWS for scalability. Critical requirements include uptime, scale, handling spiky traffic patterns, and architecting for change. The partnership between Aerospike and AWS enables customers to facilitate massive scale in the ad tech industry. Experimentation with new features is key to improving platform performance and efficiency.

Aerospike's Collection Data Types (CDTs) offer powerful capabilities for modeling and accessing data, particularly with List and Map data types. The CDTs can be indexed to enable efficient querying of JSON documents and other complex objects. New indexing capabilities in Aerospike Database 6.1 allow elements in a CDT to be indexed based on their index, key, rank, or value, regardless of nesting level. This enables powerful queries such as equality and range queries on integer values, as well as containment queries on string values. The application should carefully determine the correct context-path while defining an index, taking into account data and application semantics. Additionally, when values that need to be indexed are not available in one List or Map, consider replicating them in a separate List for defining an index, and keep the indexed List in sync with the values.