May 2019 Summaries

The tutorial provides an overview of using the Aiven command-line interface (CLI) for managing various services, including PostgreSQL, through simple bash commands. It highlights the enhancements made since 2019 to the Aiven CLI, offering guidance on installation, authentication, and executing tasks such as viewing and managing services, clouds, and event logs. The tutorial emphasizes the use of the CLI for quick command execution, scripting, and automation, while also serving as a basic reference for bash scripting. It includes examples of using the --json switch and the jq tool for more powerful data extraction, and offers tips for creating aliases for frequently-used commands. The guide encourages users to explore Aiven's globally-available open-source services and provides resources for further learning and updates.

MyHoard is an open-source tool developed by Aiven to automate MySQL backups. The tool was created due to the lack of existing solutions that met their specific requirements, such as seamless failovers and support for various cloud storages. MyHoard uses Percona XtraBackup for creating and restoring snapshots, while also handling scheduling, removing old backups, retrying operations, monitoring, and more. It ensures binary logs are rotated within a reasonable amount of time to avoid excessive disk usage and automatically purges binary logs that have been backed up. MyHoard is designed to run as a systemd service and takes a JSON configuration file for managing MySQL-related settings, cloud object storage configurations, backup options, and monitoring preferences.

In a world where data is critical currency, cloud databases require proper security and management. With 95% of U.S.-based organizations migrating to the cloud, it's essential to have effective database management practices in place. These include designing a cloud data management strategy, encrypting and tokenizing data at rest, securing data with identity and access management (IAM), protecting data in transit with encryption and VPN, and monitoring database management tasks with automation. Implementing these best practices can help organizations maintain, protect, and analyze their company data effectively.

Aiven has achieved HIPAA compliance, a US healthcare standard, as of December 2018. This means that all Aiven services can be used in a HIPAA compliant manner for health care use cases and applications. To access Aiven services under HIPAA requirements, contact sales for a Business Associate Agreement (BAA). The current list of HIPAA-compliant services includes Aiven for Apache Kafka, Aiven for PostgreSQL, Aiven for MySQL, Aiven for OpenSearch, Aiven for Cassandra, Aiven for Redis, and Aiven for InfluxDB.

In 2019, Aiven began its journey towards becoming compliant with the Service Organization Control (SOC) 2 standard. The company hired one of the top three consulting firms globally to assist in this process and expects to achieve SOC 2 compliance within a few months. Aiven is already ISO 27001 compliant, which has prepared them for the challenges associated with SOC 2 compliance. They have stringent Information Security Management Systems (ISMS) policies and procedures in place, which should help ensure a smooth and quick transition to full compliance. For updates on their progress, check back with Aiven's blog or social media channels.

This blog discusses the use of Apache Kafka® for data streaming, focusing on its pub-sub subscription model and asynchronous communication capabilities. It explains how producers append events to distributed logs called topics, while consumers consume data from these topics by offset. The producer/consumer or pub-sub model is ideal for loose coupling between components and asynchronous communication in scenarios like microservices architecture (MSA). The blog then demonstrates setting up an Aiven Kafka instance, implementing a producer and consumer, and running them together to illustrate the benefits of Apache Kafka®.