July 2023 Summaries

Digitalparking AG, the Swiss market leader in digital payment solutions for parking, relies on Aiven for PostgreSQL® to manage its growing data volume. As more users adopt the company's Parkingpay app, the variety and volume of stored data have increased significantly. By using Aiven for PostgreSQL, Digitalparking has achieved superior levels of scalability, performance, and reliability while reducing business risks associated with potential database failures. The in-house team can now focus on providing more value to customers, as Aiven manages the open source solution effectively.

Cluster configuration backups have been introduced to Aiven for Apache Kafka, allowing users to restore their cluster configurations quickly and easily. This feature is particularly useful in the event of an outage or planned shutdown, as it can save time and effort by restoring topics definition and configuration, user definitions, ACLs, and server configurations with a single click. The backup covers various components from the Kafka ecosystem, including Apache Kafka topics, users and ACLs, Schema Registry, and Connect configurations. This feature is now available for all new services and will be automatically enabled after the regular service maintenance cycle for existing ones.

The high availability feature in Klaw, an open source project by Aiven, has been announced to eliminate single points of failure and ensure minimal or no downtime. This feature is crucial for managing and governing Apache Kafka® ACLs and permissions in various organizations. High availability minimizes downtime, enhances scalability, ensures data availability, maintains service continuity, and improves user experience. The developer team introduced a cache reset mechanism to enable high availability deployment of Klaw. This feature provides load balancing, fault tolerance, and least connected balancing benefits. Users can learn more about Klaw on its project website or GitHub organization.

Aiven for Apache Kafka introduces quotas to help organizations control the resources client applications can use within a Kafka cluster. This feature is particularly useful for shared Kafka clusters, where multiple teams often share the cluster resources by having dedicated topics where data is produced, consumed, enriched, and transformed. Quotas in Apache Kafka provide a mechanism for managing and limiting the number of broker resources Kafka clients use, ensuring that the performance of the cluster remains consistent and there are no potential degradations. Key benefits include more accurate operations and governance, greater cost optimization, and minimization of data and schema duplication. Aiven for Apache Kafka now supports consumer throttle, producer throttle, and CPU throttle quotas to help manage network bandwidth and CPU usage effectively.

Brolly, a social media archiving & insights platform, needed a robust and compliant way to capture and store its massive volumes of customer data. The company partnered with Aiven to create a modern data infrastructure using Apache Kafka®. This partnership has significantly contributed to reducing system errors and operating costs while freeing up valuable IT resources for Brolly. Since implementing Apache Kafka, Brolly has been able to manage its resources better, resulting in a reduction in infrastructure total cost of ownership by 60% and an increase in operational efficiencies by more than 200%.

In June 2023, Aiven team members spoke at various events and podcasts. Topics included Apache Kafka®, ClickHouse®, OpenSearch®, Postgres, and more. Some of the key speakers were Olena Kutsenko, Celeste Horgan, Matty Stratton, and Angie Byron. In July 2023, Aiven will be participating in FOSSY 2023, EuroPython 2023, Product Marketing Festival 2023, Riviera Dev, and Open Source Data Infrastructure (OSDI) Meetups around the world.

Aiven's MySQL service offers managed solutions that leverage economies of scale to provide specialized knowledge and tooling. In January 2023, Aiven's Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team identified a bug causing restart loops in some MySQL databases. The issue was traced back to a change in data types introduced in MySQL 8.0.30. Aiven decided to backport the fix to MySQL 8.0.30, ensuring robust backup tooling and mitigating the issue for customers. Managed services like Aiven's provide access to expertise and resources that may not be feasible or efficient for individual businesses to develop on their own.

Talon.One, an enterprise-grade promotion and loyalty solution, has successfully managed its cloud costs while leveraging the benefits of moving to the cloud. The company uses Aiven's data platform, which includes open source PostgreSQL® and Apache Kafka® services running on Google Cloud. By utilizing standardized plans with optimal resources for each customer, Talon.One has significantly reduced its PostgreSQL costs. Additionally, Aiven allows for cost-efficient scaling up and down of databases as needed. The company also uses Aiven for Apache Kafka® to minimize data pipeline costs, resulting in a fixed price per month per cluster and predictable expenses. Overall, Talon.One's partnership with Aiven has been instrumental in controlling costs while maximizing cloud usage and efficiency.

Talon.One, an enterprise-grade promotion and loyalty solution, has optimized its cloud costs while reaping the benefits of moving to the cloud with the help of Aiven's data platform. By using standardized plans from Aiven for PostgreSQL® and Apache Kafka®, Talon.One can select the optimal resources for each customer's unique requirements, leading to significant cost reductions. Additionally, Aiven enables efficient scaling up and down of databases as needed, further optimizing costs. As Talon.One continues to grow, managing and minimizing data costs will remain a priority, with Aiven playing a key role in their cost optimization efforts.