What's new at Aiven: Q2/2023

Time flies here at Aiven! Last quarter was a busy one with our team releasing many new products and features that enable our existing and new customers to decrease their Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), integrate vector search with operational data, add High Availability (HA) to the management of their Kafka infrastructure and much more. Take a closer look at some of the main product launches in Q2 2023 below!

Aiven introduced free plans for PostgreSQL^®, MySQL and Redis^®*

Back in April 2023, Aiven introduced free plans for all for Aiven for PostgreSQL, Aiven for MySQL, and Aiven for Caching to support the company’s mission to build the trusted open source data platform for everyone and enable developers around the world with the best open source data and streaming technologies.

The free plans are available across [nine AWS regions globally], and have the following specifications:

• Single node
• 1 CPU
• 1GB RAM
• For PostgreSQL and MySQL: 5GB storage

The free plans are designed to support developers who might be kicking off a new project or exploring alternatives to an existing solution, and can now easily get started with popular open source databases at no cost. What's more, if they need extra capacity, users of the free plans can easily upgrade to a paid plan with no interruption.

Alongside the free service plans, we also launched the Aiven Community Forum - a space for developers to collaborate, share knowledge and help others with the applications they are building with open source data technologies. Users can share what they are working on, get support on challenges that they are facing, ask questions and get answers. If you haven’t joined the Community Forum yet, you can join today here and introduce yourself to the community.

Aiven’s Bring-Your-Own-Cloud (BYOC) deployment model reaches general availability

In May 2023, Aiven introduced a new deployment model for the Aiven Platform enabling customers to achieve a lower Total-Cost-of-Ownership (TCO) while keeping full control of their data. Bring-Your-Own-Cloud (BYOC) allows customers to deploy Aiven services directly into their own public cloud account - and enjoy the Aiven service experience across all 11 of the open source services that we provide.

Bring-Your-Own-Cloud (BYOC) connects a customer’s own AWS, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure VPC to the Aiven platform, making it possible to deploy Aiven services directly to their own cloud account. This means that all compute, storage, and networking infrastructure services - and associated costs - remain under a customer’s direct control.

Find out more in our blog: Optimize your cloud data infrastructure spend with Aiven’s Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC)

Aiven brings Vector Search capabilities in Aiven for PostgreSQL^® with pgvector

June 2023 saw the release of the pgvector extension in Aiven for PostgreSQL, allowing developers to store vectorized data in the popular database, and perform similarity searches with SQL. The new pgvector extension bridges the gap between Machine Learning and transactional data while unlocking new capabilities on top of customer data such as:

• The ability to create a recommendation system that only suggests products in stock with PostgreSQL's ACID features by joining product information and stock levels, then performing a vector search.
• The option to build an anomaly detection system to understand patterns, by combining the power of vector search and trend analytics, defining good behaviors, and generating alerts for non-compliant scenarios.
• The capability to build Natural Language Processing pipelines to deliver tailored insights based on prompts, by taking advantage of the combination of Large Language Models (LLMs) and pgvector.

Explore more of the unlocked use cases in our blog: Enabling Vector Search in Aiven for PostgreSQL® with pgvector

Klaw version 2.4

Q2 2023 saw the upgrade of Klaw, the open source Apache Kafka® governance tool driven by Aiven, to version 2.4. Klaw helps users of Apache Kafka to define team ownership over topics and connectors and allows approval flows corresponding to specific business unit organizations in Apache Kafka. The latest version brings additional features and capabilities, including:

• Redesigned screens with React UI
• Password reset with token
• Enhanced email notifications
• Improved error responses to UI

For a full list of the features added in Klaw 2.4 check the release announcement.

New additions to Aiven for Apache Flink^®

The functionality of Aiven for Apache Flink was further enhanced in Q2 2023 with the addition of a built-in CDC Connector for PostgreSQL and the ability to consume and produce data to any instance of Apache Kafka reachable by the Aiven services, whether it is managed by Aiven or not.

The new functionalities aim at providing a streaming SQL layer on top of your data, no matter where it resides. At the same time, they unlock new use cases such as capturing row changes to a PostgreSQL database with Change Data Capture (CDC) in real time.

For more information on the latest additions to Aiven for Apache Flink, check our blog: [What’s new with Aiven for Apache Flink® - Q2 2023]

Improved security with Aiven and GitHub's secret scanning partnership

In May 2023 we announced Aiven’s partnership with the GitHub secret scanning program to enable customers to scan private repositories for Aiven secrets and API tokens, something that was previously only possible on public repositories. This partnership further enhances the security of customers’ repositories on GitHub by helping customers keep their code and secrets safe.

Learn more about the partnership in our blog: Improving security: Aiven and GitHub's secret scanning partnership

Aiven expands its complete portfolio of technologies via self-service through the AWS Marketplace

Back in April 2023, Aiven announced that the full power of its open source data platform is seamlessly available to AWS customers via the AWS Marketplace. The announcement marked a significant milestone with AWS with deeper collaboration and closer partnership.

Among other benefits, AWS customers can now seamlessly leverage their existing commitments with AWS to expand their tech stack with Aiven open source services. They can also take advantage of 40+ AWS service connectors such as CloudWatch, S3, VPC peering, Transit Gateway, and Private Link for easy integrations and security with existing AWS workloads.

Read more in our blog: Aiven Expands Data Platform on AWS Marketplace

Aiven customers can now update their support tier directly through the Aiven console

From May 2023, all Aiven customers have the capability to update their Support Tier directly through the Aiven Console. This greatly simplifies the customer experience by allowing the customer to directly select between Basic, Priority, Business, and Enterprise support in the Aiven Console.

Get started today

This was only a glimpse of the new features brought to you by Aiven in Q2 2023.

If you haven’t tried Aiven yet, be sure to sign up for a free trial and get a first-hand experience of all the new functionality mentioned above or follow our changelog for the full list of updates on the Aiven Console.

We are also organizing a webinar where our product team will talk more about the capabilities developed in Q2 and give a glimpse of what’s coming in Q3 2023 and beyond. Be sure to sign up below.

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