September 2025 Summaries

Aiven has launched PostgreSQL 18, positioning itself as the first managed PostgreSQL provider to support this latest version, which brings significant performance and flexibility enhancements. Key features include an asynchronous I/O subsystem that improves throughput and reduces latency, notably benefiting read-heavy workloads, as well as optimizations in JOIN and GROUP BY operations for faster query execution. The version also introduces parallel GIN index creation for quicker index maintenance, unenforced constraints for greater schema evolution flexibility, and skip scans for B-tree indexes that enhance query performance. Additionally, PostgreSQL 18 improves concurrency with better locking mechanisms and makes virtual generated columns the default, offering a trade-off between storage and computation. Aiven encourages users to explore these innovations with a free 30-day trial and stay updated on further developments through their events page and social media channels.

In a strategic move to address licensing concerns and enhance open-source compatibility, Aiven successfully migrated approximately 15,000 Redis servers to Valkey, a fully open-source managed service developed as an alternative to Redis. Spearheaded by Aiven's Senior Software Engineer Bogdan Petre and backed by the Linux Foundation, Valkey offers the same functionalities and compatibility with Redis 7.2.4, ensuring a seamless transition for existing applications. The migration was facilitated through a user-friendly "Upgrade to Valkey" button in the Aiven Console, alongside an automated migration process during scheduled maintenance times, resulting in a smooth transition for customers. This initiative underscores Aiven's commitment to open-source solutions, providing developers with a robust, scalable, and future-proof in-memory database platform that eliminates licensing uncertainties associated with Redis.

The Aiven blog post, "Diskless 2.0: Unified, Zero-Copy Apache Kafka," discusses the integration of Apache Kafka Tiered Storage (KIP-405) with Diskless Topics (KIP-1150) to create a unified path that enables zero-copy migration. This enhancement allows Kafka to write to object storage directly, reducing cloud costs and improving performance by eliminating the need for local disks. The integration addresses challenges such as format inconsistencies, complexity, and migration friction, while also simplifying architecture and ensuring compatibility with existing plugins like Iceberg. The blog highlights the economic advantages of using S3 Express for storage, which offers lower latency and cost compared to traditional disk-based solutions. By adopting Tiered Diskless, Kafka can now provide a more efficient and scalable system that aligns with modern cloud economics and community demands, making Diskless the future of Apache Kafka.

The integration of Apache Kafka with Apache Iceberg offers an innovative solution for bridging the gap between real-time data streaming and analytical workloads, eliminating the need for complex ETL pipelines. Apache Iceberg, a table format optimized for large-scale analytic datasets, provides features such as ACID transactions, schema evolution, and time travel, making it suitable for data lakes. Iceberg Topics allow Kafka to write data directly into Iceberg table format, facilitating seamless querying through engines like Spark or Trino while maintaining Kafka API compatibility. This integration simplifies architectures by reducing duplicate storage systems and infrastructure costs, enabling immediate real-time analytics without batch processing delays. With the help of Aiven's Remote Storage Manager plugin, users can experiment locally using Docker to set up a complete environment, demonstrating how Kafka streams data into Iceberg tables stored in MinIO. The synergy between Kafka and Iceberg heralds a shift toward unified streaming and analytical systems, offering significant benefits for stream processing, data engineering, and analytics teams by reducing operational complexity and enhancing data accessibility.