August 2022 Summaries

Aiven provides an open-source solution to securely manage PostgreSQL extensions without granting superuser access. The company's Security Agent for PostgreSQL (aiven-gatekeeper) controls which privileged functions are exposed and prevents their abuse in common privilege escalation attacks. It uses three criteria for risk assessment: creating_extension, is_elevated, and is_security_restricted. The agent also blocks access to certain built-in functions and writes to internal tables. Aiven has received third-party validation of the solution from Leviathan Security Group.

On August 23, 2022, Aiven will complete its migration away from Elasticsearch to OpenSearch®. This change affects backward compatibility with the Elasticsearch API and metrics. After this date, users should switch to using the Aiven for OpenSearch® API instead of the Aiven for Elasticsearch API. Additionally, accessing service information via the Aiven API will change, as well as differences in the Aiven Console and metric integrations. Users are encouraged to follow migration instructions provided by Aiven.

The article discusses the challenges of managing data assets across various technologies and provides a solution using graph theory and an open-source metadata parser developed by Aiven. The parser helps to extract information about data assets from different technologies, such as PostgreSQL, Apache Kafka, and Apache Flink, and represent them in a common queryable format. By treating each object as a node and connections between objects as edges, the parser creates an interactive graph that can be used for data lineage tracking, GDPR assessments, security audits, and impact assessments. The metadata parser is open-source and welcomes contributions to improve its coverage of tools and ways of parsing and displaying results.

Apache Kafka version 3.2 has been released with numerous improvements and bug fixes. A key highlight is the implementation of a built-in Authorizer that does not depend on ZooKeeper, bringing the software closer to using self-managed metadata quorum based on KRaft. Other enhancements include new leader recovery state, allowing connect APIs to list all connector plugins, and an additional endpoint for retrieving specific connector plugin configs. Aiven users can upgrade to version 3.2 with no downtime.