December 2017 Summaries

PostgreSQL performance was tested on five cloud infrastructures - Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, DigitalOcean, and UpCloud - using two different benchmark tests. The first test compared the performance of 4 vCPU / 16GB RAM instances with network-backed disks across all clouds. The second test compared network and local SSD performance in AWS and GCP with the same instance sizes as the first. Google Cloud and UpCloud led both benchmarks, while DigitalOcean showed larger differences between different regions. Amazon and Azure had a smaller performance gap, and UpCloud's inter-region performance gap was almost nonexistent. The results emphasize the importance of data access latency in database performance and the need for proper configuration to match specific workloads and infrastructure setups.

Apache Kafka 1.0 is now available on the Aiven platform, bringing enhanced metrics support, improved memory usage during partition reassignment, and support for Java 9. The release represents a "Completeness of our vision" according to Neha Narkhede, CTO of Confluent. Aiven Kafka will be making these metrics available in the upcoming weeks. Newly created Aiven Kafka services will be running on 1.0 automatically and current client Kafka services will be upgraded in January.