August 2023 Summaries

Aiven has achieved Google Cloud Ready - BigQuery designation and launched an Apache Flink® to BigQuery sink connector, enabling real-time analysis of streaming data within the Google BigQuery ecosystem. This integration allows organizations to leverage real-time data computations for better customer insights and faster response times. The open source connector for Flink and BigQuery is available as an integration in the Aiven Console, allowing users to seamlessly integrate their streaming data with the BigQuery ecosystem in Google Cloud regions worldwide.

The Klaw team has developed reliable, composable, and delightful web forms using TypeScript, react-hook-form, and zod libraries. These tools have enabled the creation of extensible forms that are easy to understand for contributors and provide strong validation capabilities. The use of react-hook-form allows for the creation of composable building blocks for forms, while zod provides a robust schema declaration and validation library. By splitting responsibilities between these two libraries and co-locating form schemas with their respective forms, the Klaw team has achieved its objectives of creating reliable, composable, and delightful web forms.

Olena Babenko, a newly promoted Staff Engineer at Aiven, shares her journey to the company and offers insights into life as an engineer. Originally from Ukraine, she has traveled extensively and worked in various countries before settling in Finland. Her career began with early experience in Ukraine and Moscow, followed by a stint at Zalando SE in Germany. Olena's determination led her to learn Linux and cloud systems through online platforms like Cloud Guru and Udemy, eventually joining Aiven as a mid-level Software Engineer. She was promoted to Staff Engineer recently, working on the "Helpful Husky" team focused on building better data streaming services. Olena emphasizes the importance of courage, code, and community in her work at Aiven, highlighting the company's support for remote work and asynchronous communication that fosters innovation. She also shares advice for a career in engineering, including participating in meetups, finding mentors, and seeking opportunities to contribute to open source projects.

Olena Babenko, a Staff Engineer at Aiven, shares her journey in tech, highlighting her sideways exploration from Ukraine to various countries including Finland, where she currently resides. She emphasizes the importance of family support and mentorship in her career growth. Olena's experience with Apache Kafka® and Flink at Zalando proved valuable when joining Aiven as a mid-level Software Engineer. Her recent promotion to Staff Engineer allows her to make an even greater impact on both staff and customers. She appreciates the flexibility, openness to new ideas, and remote work culture at Aiven. Olena's advice for a career in engineering includes participating in meetups, finding the right mentor, and seeking continuous learning opportunities.

Aiven has launched "Aiven Ideas," a public product roadmap that allows customers to influence the direction of Aiven's product development by providing feedback on existing features, posting ideas for new features, and voting on others' suggestions. The platform aims to improve transparency and foster closer collaboration between Aiven's product teams and their customers. Users can receive notifications about changes in idea statuses and may be contacted by the team for more information. To participate, register on Aiven Ideas and provide feedback or new ideas.

In Q2 2023, Aiven introduced several new products and features to its platform. These include free plans for PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Redis, a Bring-Your-Own-Cloud (BYOC) deployment model reaching general availability, vector search capabilities in Aiven for PostgreSQL with pgvector, an upgrade of Klaw version 2.4, new additions to Aiven for Apache Flink, improved security through partnership with GitHub's secret scanning program, and expansion of its complete portfolio of technologies via self-service through the AWS Marketplace.