December 2021 Summaries

Developer Experience (DEX) teams have become increasingly important in software development, ensuring that developers can focus on their work without being burdened by tool issues. By setting up a DEX team, businesses may benefit from an annual advantage of $1.7 million, as estimated by IDC. The past decade has seen numerous changes in the industry, leading to a faster pace of product development and increased reliance on outside services for software, platforms, databases, and data pipelines. Companies are increasingly setting up DEX teams to handle the burden of managing technical infrastructure and other tasks related to tool management. A good DEX can boost business productivity by allowing developers to focus on their core responsibilities, leading to higher job satisfaction and increased innovation. Additionally, standardized tooling can improve recruitment efforts and enable easier mobility between teams and projects. Overall, a strong DEX team contributes to both developer happiness and a healthy bottom line for businesses.

This article discusses how to use OpenSearch with NodeJS to add a high-quality, fully open source search engine to your application. It covers setting up an OpenSearch cluster, creating flexible search queries for three main groups of requests (term-level, full-text, and boolean), and running aggregation requests and reading the results. The article also provides examples of search and aggregation queries in a GitHub repository and offers resources for further learning.

Aiven's CISO recaps the recent vulnerabilities and what Aiven did about them. The company dealt with two major security issues - a path traversal vulnerability in Grafana and a Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerability in Log4j, also known as Log4shell. Both of these issues represent some of the most interesting but also most painful kinds of security problems that Aiven has seen before and will see again. The company's monitoring noted an increase of blind path traversal requests trying to probe for the vulnerability starting on December 6th, while all Aiven services were remediated by December 11th - a period of just over 24 hours from awareness to remediation.

Aiven now supports Apache Cassandra® 4.0, the first major version upgrade since 3.0 was released in 2015. This new version offers improved stability, better performance, and faster speed with up to 25% faster throughput on read and write operations. Key features include enhanced metrics via virtual tables, workload replay with full query logging, audit logging for enhanced compliance, and Zero Copy Streaming. Users can upgrade to Apache Cassandra 4.0 from Aiven for Apache Cassandra 3 or try the latest version with a free 30-day trial.

PostgreSQL 14 introduces new features CYCLE and SEARCH, which simplify the writing of recursive queries. This article demonstrates how to use these features in a travel planning scenario. The author creates a database with tables for cities and trips, then uses recursive queries to plan a journey within a budget. The SEARCH option allows users to define the exploration path based on the number of stops or the trip path, while the CYCLE option helps avoid loops. Finally, the article shows how to factor in return trips to Rome using additional joins and conditions.

The Open Source Program Office (OSPO) at Aiven recently undertook the task of migrating Apache Kafka to Scala 3, a strong statically typed programming language that combines object-oriented and functional programming paradigms. This migration was necessary as older versions of libraries and languages eventually stop receiving updates, making them vulnerable to new security threats and incompatible with newer technologies. The process involved several challenges such as the build tool not supporting Scala 3 yet, issues related to syntax changes between Scala 2 and 3, too many automatic conversions, and problems with bytecode generation. Despite these hurdles, Aiven successfully completed the migration, which will help keep Apache Kafka up-to-date with security patches and performance improvements.

A beta version of Aiven's Apache Flink service is now publicly available, allowing users to create real-time streaming analytics and ETL applications using SQL without coding. Apache Flink is a framework and distributed processing engine for stateful computations over unbounded and bounded data streams. It is often used in various industries such as e-commerce, finance, and more to speed up business decisions by providing real-time insights derived from on-the-fly data. Aiven's Apache Flink service can be tested with the free Basic level support during the beta phase but not for full production use.

Streaming data is a valuable asset that can be leveraged to increase business agility, enable collaboration between departments, and make faster decisions. Many businesses have untapped mountains of data gold that can be utilized with streaming technologies. These tools are open source and growing in popularity due to their ability to reduce friction in innovation. Key points include the importance of real-time monitoring/scaling, anomaly detection, shopping cart abandonment for ecommerce, security, and automation. Businesses should consider leveraging streaming insights if they have a wealth of data, use database technologies that support Change Data Capture (CDC), or require increased team collaboration for business agility. Implementing streaming insights involves using technologies like Apache Kafka and Apache Flink to process and analyze data in real-time.

Aiven has launched a startup program called Cluster to help new businesses set up their data infrastructure correctly. Joining the program involves filling out an application form, after which successful applicants receive 100K of Aiven credits. These credits can be used for various services such as running PostgreSQL instances with large storage and RAM capacities or setting up a full house of data services like PostgreSQL, OpenSearch, Redis, M3, and Grafana. The program aims to help startups save costs on setting up their own data infrastructure while ensuring efficient management and maintenance. Aiven's customers have reported an average 340% three-year ROI with a 5-month payback period and 37% lower cost of operations over three years, according to a recent whitepaper by IDC.