June 2023 Summaries

HarperDB and Akamai Technologies have announced a strategic co-selling partnership that combines HarperDB's innovative enterprise application development platform with Akamai's expertise in security, content delivery networks, and global traffic management. This collaboration leverages Akamai's Connected Cloud, bolstered by its recent acquisition of Linode, to offer enterprises a unified backend solution that integrates database, application, and data streaming functionalities. By integrating HarperDB's global data fabric with Akamai's infrastructure, enterprises can simplify development, reduce latency, and achieve significant cost savings on compute requirements and egress pricing, potentially amounting to millions of dollars. This partnership aims to redefine modern application architecture by providing a more efficient, reliable, and scalable solution for managing distributed databases and ensuring data consistency on a global scale.

Harper 4.1 introduces a shift from using processes to worker threads for handling HTTP requests, enhancing concurrency and resource utilization. This change allows for better traffic control, session affinity, and debuggability, while also supporting alternative storage models. Worker threads, requiring fewer resources than processes, enable efficient use of memory by sharing a central pool for asynchronous tasks, contrasting with the high overhead of maintaining multiple processes. The main thread in Harper listens to a network port and delegates connections to worker threads, which handle HTTP parsing and response tasks, a method particularly efficient on Unix-based systems but less so on Windows. The approach leverages modern CPU capabilities for parallelism and is applicable to various JavaScript HTTP servers, offering improved performance and control over traditional process clustering methods.

HarperDB has announced a strategic partnership with StackPath to enhance enterprise application development by leveraging StackPath's edge computing capabilities and HarperDB's innovative platform. This collaboration aims to boost developer productivity and reduce costs through the deployment of distributed data and compute solutions, delivering low-latency applications to users globally. By synchronizing data across HarperDB nodes on StackPath's private backbone, developers can provide ultra-low latency experiences and significantly improve user satisfaction. This partnership allows for the reduction of global RAM requirements by avoiding monolithic central databases and hyperscaler egress, offering potential savings for enterprises as applications scale. HarperDB's CEO, Jaxon Repp, emphasized the partnership's role in simplifying application architecture and reducing complexity, thus enabling high-performance, scalable solutions. HarperDB and StackPath collectively offer the tools and infrastructure necessary for creating efficient applications, improving the user experience, and ensuring economic benefits for large-scale deployments.