March 2023 Summaries

Aerospike Database 6.3 has been released with operational improvements and new capabilities. It now supports OpenSSL 3, which allows it to run well on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 (RHEL) and Ubuntu 22.04. The release includes features such as runtime resource protection, multitenancy enhancements, logging to syslog socket, All Flash improvements, better Vault integration, and miscellaneous updates. Additionally, the developer API has been improved with document-oriented modeling capabilities.

Aerospike Database 6.3 is now Generally Available (GA), bringing operational improvements, new capabilities, and enhancements to existing features. The new release adds support for OpenSSL 3, enabling better compatibility with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 and Ubuntu 22.04. Server 6.3 includes runtime resource protection, allowing Aerospike to automatically respond under heavy load and prevent nodes from running out of memory or storage. New compression-acceleration configuration parameter trades off CPU consumption and compression ratio in systems using LZ4 storage compression. Multitenancy capabilities have been improved, enabling site reliability engineers to limit the storage used by an Aerospike set to a specified number of bytes. Additionally, logging to a syslog socket has been added, allowing log messages to be streamed to centralized logging facilities that serve the entire cluster. The release also includes improvements for All Flash deployments, such as avoiding duplicate resolution of records and faster truncation. New developer API features have been introduced, including support for document-oriented modeling and improved map operations. Secondary indexes can now be deployed durably on Intel Optane Persistent Memory (PMem), enabling Aerospike users to create multiple secondary indexes on very large datasets.

The adtech industry is undergoing significant changes due to new privacy regulations that aim to eliminate or reduce the use of cookies for targeted advertising. While some predictions made a year ago have proven accurate, such as the shift towards first-party data collection and contextual targeting, other developments are still emerging. For instance, data cooperatives in the adtech industry are increasing due to consumer willingness to share more personal information, while AI and ML strategies continue to expand. Additionally, non-cookie-based IDs like ACR data from connected TVs are being used to measure the reach and audience quality of ad campaigns. As the world moves towards buy-side cross-platform control, advertisers need to become identity agnostic in 2023 to improve ad performance across the entire digital advertising ecosystem.

Aerospike allows applications to process query results as a stream of records, which can be paginated, partitioned for parallelism, and resumed at a later time. Query execution is executed in a scatter-gather fashion, with the client library sending requests to multiple cluster nodes in parallel and gathering responses. The application can read and process all or partial records from the stream, save cursor states, and resume processing later. Queries can be run in sync or async modes, with the latter using a registered callback class to handle each record. Partition queries provide greater control over flow and parallelism, while pagination allows for retrieving results in smaller chunks until all are returned. The query results do not follow any significant order, requiring applications to sort records within themselves.

Aerospike has expanded its fully-managed service, Aerospike Cloud Managed Service (ACMS), to Microsoft Azure. This expansion allows ACMS to power real-time applications on all three major public clouds, including Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform. The Aerospike Database is designed to handle large workloads with millions of transactions per second and datasets ranging from hundreds of terabytes to multiple petabytes. Offering a managed service on all three leading public clouds provides portability and choice for different workloads. ACMS was designed using a governance model with audit controls, data protections, encryption at rest and on the wire, and is deployed within the customer's own cloud account or project in a dedicated Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) or Virtual Network. Aerospike Cloud typically delivers leading performance at an 80% lower cost and server instance footprint than alternative approaches.

Aerospike, a Platinum sponsor at Gartner Data & Analytics Summit 2023, will be presenting with TransUnion on Wednesday, March 22nd, 2023, at 2:30 PM ET in room Southern Hemisphere III (session code SPS61). The session will focus on architecting real-time applications at scale and cost-effectively using Aerospike's hybrid memory architecture. TransUnion's OneID system processes over 45 billion customer data interactions daily to reduce fraudulent transactions, and attendees can learn more about the technology and use case during the session. Aerospike will also be giving away a pair of Beats Noise Canceling headphones to a lucky attendee.

Aerospike is now offering its Cloud Managed Service on Microsoft Azure, expanding its capabilities to power real-time applications across all three major public clouds, including Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Aerospike's database provides exceptional enterprise performance and flexibility, serving large organizations such as Sony and Adobe. The service offers unmatched performance at scale, security, and cost efficiency, making it an attractive option for enterprises building applications on Azure. With Aerospike Cloud Managed Service, customers can enjoy a fully-managed database with reduced resource management requirements, allowing them to focus on their core business.

AeroLab is an automated tool that simplifies the deployment of Aerospike clusters and clients for development, testing, and lab use on either Docker or in AWS. It provides a rich feature set to simulate network faults, quickly insert and update test data, partition disks, and more. AeroLab allows users to create a custom-configured Aerospike cluster with test clients, a test load, and a monitoring stack, making it easier to deploy and manage Aerospike clusters. The tool also includes features such as automatic security group creation, node configuration, disk partitioning, and Aerospike startup. Additionally, AeroLab provides a customizable client environment for development, including a Visual Studio Code instance with pre-installed libraries for various programming languages.