What's new at Aiven: Q4/2022

Aiven for ClickHouse^® GA

In December Aiven for ClickHouse became generally available, and now Aiven lets you create fully managed data warehouses for your analytics. Read more in our blog: Aiven for ClickHouse® now generally available.

OpenSearch^® 2

October saw the upgrade of Aiven for OpenSearch to OpenSearch 2. Compared to version 1, the new release includes many improvements, including better Machine Learning capabilities, new notification plugins, and performance improvements.

If you’re already using Aiven for OpenSearch and want to upgrade to version 2, you can either wait for your scheduled maintenance window or trigger an upgrade in the Aiven Console.

See the release notes for more information.

Grafana 9

In October, we also upgraded Aiven for Grafana to version 9. This brought you such capabilities as:

• Prometheus query builder for easily pulling metrics from different sources
• Heatmap panel for visualizing time series data as a histogram
• Improved user interface with dashboard previews, improved search capabilities and favorite dashboards

The new version offers greatly simplified monitoring and enhanced usability.

Aiven on Azure Marketplace

Since November 2022, Aiven services have been available directly through Azure Marketplace. If you’re already using it, you can now add Aiven services into your mix while leveraging your long-term commitment to Microsoft Azure.

You get the same level of access to the Aiven control plane and the same great Aiven services by signing up through the Marketplace as you would by signing up directly with Aiven, and for the same price.

Cross-project service integration

Starting in December, Aiven offers cross-project service integration for metrics, logs, dashboards and data sources. You can pull logs and metrics from multiple projects to set up centralized observability for your entire Aiven data infrastructure.

To find out more and see some examples for setting up integrations, see OpenSearch log integration and Monitor Aiven services with M3DB in our documentation.

Two minor releases of Klaw

Klaw, the open source Apache Kafka® governance tool, has already seen two new minor releases here at Aiven after only joining us in October. Klaw is a part of the end-to-end event streaming ecosystem whose heart is Aiven for Apache Kafka, allowing you to securely govern your Kafka-based infrastructure.

In recent releases, we’ve improved the interface’s security experience as well as its user experience. We’ve also beefed up the documentation, addressed some security vulnerabilities, introduced Makefile... and much more.

In the recent releases, we’ve improved the security experience as well as the user experience in the interface. We’ve also beefed up the documentation, addressed some security vulnerabilities, introduced Makefile… and much more.

Among the major features we implemented are:

• SASL authentication
• JWT-based authentication to the Klaw Cluster API
• Multi-cluster connections using different SSL certificates

For a full list of improvements, read the post recapping Klaw’s big year 2022.

Recreation of replication slots

In December, we released a new feature for Aiven for PostgreSQL®: logical replication slots are now recreated in the event of a failover or switchover.

Your PostgreSQL will recover from a failover, but if you’ve set up logical replication slots they used to require being recreated manually. This resulted in downtime, as the database couldn’t accept new writes in the meantime. Now Aiven for PostgreSQL will do this for you, and it’s much quicker than doing it yourself.

For more information, check out Aiven for PostgreSQL® now recreates logical replication slots automatically on the Aiven blog.

Aiven Console updates

The Aiven Console saw several facelifts and improvements over the quarter. All of them merit attention, so let's take a closer look.

Find your services more easily

You can now apply filtering in the Services list. This is handy if your Console currently shows a giant wall-of-services! You can filter by service type, service status, or cloud provider.

Quickly connect to your Aiven service

Quick Connect is a feature that makes it quick and easy to connect to your Aiven for PostgreSQL®, MySQL®, Apache Kafka®, Redis®, and OpenSearch®.

Clearer Integrations tab

The Integrations tab for each service now distinguishes between internal and external integrations, and shows more relevant information. You can now see where data is coming from and where it’s being sent to, plus other aspects of current integrations. We also updated the descriptions to make it clearer what to use each integration for.

Navigation update

Renewed top-level navigation that makes it easier to navigate between your accounts and projects, and to find the most important management features. Go to the Aiven Console and take a look at the top bar.

Renewed Changelog

As the icing on the (crab?) cake, Aiven’s Changelog has also undergone a transformation. With the aid of our excellent technical writers, it gives you a better understanding of what has changed and why, and whether action is needed on your side. It also points you to further information and help resources.

Check out the new changelog at https://aiven.io/changelog. To be quite honest, it now makes for a good read!

And incidentally, that’s where you’ll also find all the minor updates we couldn’t list in this post without making it way too long.

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