April 2016 Summaries

PGHoard is a cloud backup and restore solution developed by Aiven, designed to provide real-time streaming backups of PostgreSQL databases to potentially untrusted cloud object storage. It features an extensible object storage interface that works with various cloud providers such as AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage, OpenStack Swift, Ceph's RADOSGW, and Microsoft Azure Storage (experimental). The solution ensures data integrity by handling full backups and streaming write-ahead logs. It also includes tools for backup restoration, allowing users to create new master or standby databases from the object store archives. PGHoard supports encryption and authentication using RSA, AES, and SHA256 algorithms to protect backups from unauthorized access. The solution is available as a Python package that can be installed on any system with Python 3.

Aiven has introduced a new feature allowing custom domains with valid SSL certificates for web frontends. This enables users to create CNAMEs in their own domain pointing to their Aiven service, which can then be registered in the Aiven Web Console. The platform will automatically set up a valid SSL certificate for the custom domain. This feature is available in all Startup, Business and Premium plans for Grafana and Elasticsearch services. Users can sign up for a free trial of these services at aiven.io with $10 worth of free credits.

Aiven's guide provides a detailed walkthrough on using InfluxDB and Grafana to collect and monitor metrics, highlighting a case study involving the health monitoring of a quality assurance system in an industrial manufacturing line. The system utilizes IP-based video cameras and IO triggers to capture images of artifacts, with the data visualized on a Grafana dashboard to verify system functionality. InfluxDB serves as the time-series database underpinning the solution, benefiting from its fast query capabilities and adaptive compression algorithms. Telegraf acts as the metrics collector, interfacing with InfluxDB via StatsD, allowing seamless and secure metrics transmission. The guide emphasizes the ease of setting up these services through Aiven, where Grafana and InfluxDB services are preconfigured to work together, simplifying the visualization of data. The article concludes by encouraging readers to explore further resources on using open-source tools for observability and to consider signing up for Aiven's services.