October 2017 Summaries

In August, Aiven held an Apache Kafka meetup in Helsinki to discuss hot topics surrounding Kafka. Due to its popularity, they decided to make it an ongoing event and held their second meetup yesterday at Lifeline Ventures' office in downtown Helsinki. The two presenters were Niklas Nylund of Paf, who discussed how his team brought Kafka in to act as a data bus for their real-time analytics needs, and Heikki Nousiainen, Aiven's CTO, who discussed the Kafka Connect framework and its use cases. The transition from a monolithic to microservices architecture is strengthening the use case for integrating Kafka as a streaming platform. Another Aiven meetup is planned for December/January.

PostgreSQL 10 is now available on all major clouds through Aiven, including AWS, Google, Azure, UpCloud, and DigitalOcean. This release focuses on improving the distribution of massive amounts of data across many nodes. Key features include improved support for parallel queries, declarative partitioning support, hash indexes, and native logical replication. Users can easily test PostgreSQL 10 with Aiven by creating a full copy of their existing PostgreSQL service as a separate PostgreSQL 10 service without affecting the performance of the source service.

Aiven, a global Database as a Service (DBaaS) provider, is being utilized by Stanford Student Space Initiative (SSI), a student group focused on space development projects such as high-altitude balloon platforms and cube satellites. For their latest launch, SSI used Aiven's InfluxDB service to store and analyze data from their ValBal platform, which tests lighter and more efficient mechanics and avionics for increased endurance. The communications system being tested is expected to allow real-time transmission of collected data back to the launch site, reducing the need for payload recovery. This collaboration showcases Aiven's capabilities in high-altitude research flights and contributes to a better understanding of Earth through space development projects.