February 2023 Summaries

Aiven, in collaboration with SlashData, conducted a comprehensive study on data management practices among 500 IT professionals working for digital-native companies. The report reveals that event streaming and message queues are set to become the second most popular type of data management systems among these businesses. CTO Heikki Nousiainen advises his peers to familiarize themselves with technology, centralize their experience core, and foster an environment where developers can explore new tools. Managed databases play a crucial role in this approach by freeing up developer time for productivity and job satisfaction. Furthermore, the study highlights that sustainability is becoming increasingly important, with companies likely to prioritize reducing their environmental footprint over optimizing costs in the future.

On 17th January 2023, Aiven and BigData Boutique held an OpenSearch® Fireside Chat on Lessons learned from maintaining 10K+ OpenSearch® clusters in production. The panel discussed the growth of OpenSearch since its inception in January 2021 and covered topics such as best practices for improving performance, managed services, and future developments. Some key points included the importance of indexing, the simplicity of the product for developers, and the potential for vector search and support for machine learning/artificial intelligence. The panel also highlighted the maturation of OpenSearch with more sensible configuration choices defaulting to "on".

Aiven has introduced a fully managed Apache Flink® service, allowing businesses to leverage real-time data processing. The combination of Apache Kafka and Apache Flink enables the creation of a robust event streaming infrastructure. Apache Flink makes it easy to build, deploy, and operate streaming analytics and event-driven applications. Aiven's managed service for Apache Flink is now generally available, offering a fully managed Apache Flink service that can be deployed in the cloud of your choice, a unique self-service Flink SQL suite, and an automation layer eliminating operational overhead. The utility of Flink without the operational overhead is made possible by Aiven's managed service for Apache Flink, which allows users to distribute their cluster across multiple cloud providers.

Aiven has released several new features and improvements during the last quarter of 2022, including the general availability of Aiven for ClickHouse®, an upgrade to OpenSearch® 2, an upgrade to Grafana 9, making Aiven services available on Azure Marketplace, offering cross-project service integration, two minor releases of Klaw, recreation of replication slots in Aiven for PostgreSQL®, and updates to the Aiven Console. These enhancements aim to improve user experience, security, and functionality across various Aiven products and services.

Aiven has recently made several updates and improvements to its services and offerings. Aiven for ClickHouse is now generally available, providing fully managed data warehouses for analytics, while Aiven for OpenSearch has been upgraded to version 2, offering enhanced machine learning capabilities and performance improvements. Aiven for Grafana has been updated to version 9, featuring a Prometheus query builder and improved user interface. Aiven services have been accessible through Azure Marketplace since November 2022, allowing users to integrate Aiven services with their Azure commitments. Cross-project service integration has been introduced for centralized observability, and Klaw, an open-source Apache Kafka governance tool, has seen two minor releases with improvements in security and user experience. A new feature for Aiven for PostgreSQL now automatically recreates logical replication slots after failovers, reducing downtime. The Aiven Console has undergone updates to improve navigation, service filtering, and integration clarity, and the Changelog has been revamped to provide clearer insights and help resources.

The Aiven Console is transitioning from "accounts" to "organizations," allowing users to globally manage and scale their setups on the platform. Organizations can be consolidated using organizational units, which will enable users to separate production and testing projects for efficient management. This change is fully backward-compatible, maintaining existing API endpoints and Terraform state files. Upcoming features include user groups, domains, managed users, and syncing users and user groups via identity providers.

Duleepa "Dups" Wijayawardhana, CTO for Supermetrics, discusses how Aiven has helped the company manage data across multiple clouds. Supermetrics is a Finland-based company that helps over 17,000 customers move data from scattered marketing platforms into their go-to analytics and reporting tools. With the help of Aiven, Supermetrics can centrally manage its entire data infrastructure while maintaining open source databases in different clouds and regions. The company's next goal is to enable full data sovereignty for customers, allowing them to choose where their data is processed.

PostgreSQL users often hesitate to upgrade due to the downtime involved, but Aiven has made major PG upgrades easy with their in-place upgrades that take seconds or a minute at most. The process involves automatic checks for upgrade possibility, shutting down standby nodes, upgrading primary node, creating full backup, and creating new standby nodes. Users can initiate the process through Aiven Console by simply clicking a button.

Aiven introduces PostgreSQL® version 15 with significant improvements and performance enhancements. The new version offers better sort performance and compression, developer features such as SQL standard MERGE command and string inspection with regular expressions, updated public schema permissions, row filtering and column lists for publishers in logical replication, and more. Users can upgrade to PostgreSQL 15 to benefit from these features.