What's new at Aiven: Q4/2023 - Q1/2024

The Aiven team strives to enhance our platform with new features to enable organizations to innovate rapidly and manage their growing data infrastructure efficiently. In case you missed some of our newest product news, we’ll take a glimpse here so you can discover our latest developments! In this blog, we’ll cover:

• AI-powered query rewrite optimizations
• Bring your own cloud (BYOC) automation for AWS
• Cost efficiency and scalability with tiered storage
• Aiven for Opensearch upgrades
• Aiven for PostgreSQL 16 support

Aiven provides early availability of AI-powered data optimization capabilities with the acquisition of EverSQL

Aiven announced its acquisition of EverSQL and the integration of EverSQL’s AI-powered engine into the Aiven Platform back in November. This provides new performance and cost optimization capabilities to our customers. With EverSQL in the Aiven Platform, customers benefit from automated, personalized, and actionable insights to help fine-tune their data architecture, such as AI-powered query rewrite optimizations and index recommendations. The Aiven AI database optimizer improves database performance, reduces hardware requirements, and helps reduce costs. Early feedback has been great with customers from BrandAlley and Fortes Tecnologia already seeing the benefits of EverSQL by Aiven:

“EverSQL by Aiven has been an excellent tool for us. Previously we had numerous outages on our production website due to database issues. By implementing EverSQL by Aiven and their indexing optimizations we haven’t seen any outages in the last 6 months,” says Phil Brady, DevOps Engineer at BrandAlley.

"My client achieved a reduction of over 50% in their cloud costs while also doubling the efficiency of their databases (with some indicators showing a gain of up to 20x)," Henrylle Maia, AWS Consultant at Fortes Tecnologia.

If you want to take EverSQL for a spin and see how you can optimize your database contact the Aiven account team today!

Aiven delivers self-service Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) automation for AWS

In November, we unveiled our self-service Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) feature for AWS, marking a significant leap forward in cloud deployment flexibility and cost efficiency. BYOC gives AWS customers the ability to deploy Aiven services within their AWS accounts in the regions of their choice. This addresses the needs of AWS global customers by offering an improved solution for infrastructure governance and data sovereignty. AWS customers pay for Aiven data infrastructure by using their AWS discounts to save costs. Companies can optimize cost without compromising the quality or management of their infrastructure. If you want to learn more about how to optimize your cloud data infrastructure spend with Aiven’s BYOC model, check out this blog.

The self-service BYOC workflow on the Aiven console enables customers to quickly deploy Aiven data infrastructure services within their AWS accounts. This simplifies the deployment of Aiven's managed data services into these custom environments, ensuring customers benefit from our platform's hallmark features: developer-centric tools, round-the-clock monitoring and alerting, proactive maintenance, upgrades, and an unwavering 99.99% availability SLA. Importantly, this model also unlocks up to 35% in cost savings on Aiven services using customer AWS discounts.

Supermetrics, a marketing data analytics company with a 750k user base and serving billions of queries, was an early user of Aiven’s BYOC deployment method. Supermetrics integrates with over 100 different platforms, whether it’s a spreadsheet, a data warehouse, or a BI tool.

“Aiven’s built some amazing technology on top of open source databases to move them around in different clouds in different regions,” Dups Wijayawardhana, CTO at Supermetrics.

Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) is available on AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Our self-service functionality has been enabled for AWS at present and more automations are coming for other major cloud vendors soon!

The BYOC automation on AWS can be easily enabled by contacting the Aiven account team!

Unlocking Improved Cost Efficiency and Scalability with Tiered Storage for Aiven for Apache Kafka^® and Aiven for Clickhouse^®

In December, Aiven introduced early availability of Tiered Storage for Apache Kafka® to address the challenges customers face when supporting large-scale data storage within data streaming systems. Aiven for Apache Kafka is one of our most popular technologies, and we are beyond thrilled to bring this new functionality to our platform! Tiered storage significantly enhances the performance, scalability, and cost structure of large-scale Kafka environments. Customers have reported a reduction in storage costs of up to 90%!

Tiered Storage has a dual-tier storage setup where the local storage tier continues to be used for storing fresh, hot data on the Apache Kafka broker nodes, and the remote storage tier uses cloud object storage such as Amazon S3, Azure Blob Storage, or Google Cloud Storage for warm and cold data. This tiered storage setup saves money by reducing the size of the broker node and improving upgrade and migration performance by eliminating the need for large node-to-node data replication operations, while keeping a full, auditable log of all data within the Kafka environment.

Some key benefits of tiered storage in Aiven for Apache Kafka include:

• Limitless storage in Aiven for Apache Kafka
• Greater elasticity for Aiven for Apache Kafka clusters
• Optimized cloud infrastructure costs

Tiered Storage is also in early availability in Aiven for ClickHouse® and brings the same functionality to all your analytics workloads with the added benefit of ClickHouse’s compression combined with potentially infinite object storage capabilities. Use Tiered Storage as you develop and grow, for a fraction of the cost, choosing freely what remains on disk and is accessible faster, and what goes in object storage.

If you are interested in trying out tiered storage in either Aiven for Apache Kafka or Aiven for Clickhouse, you can start a trial or get in touch with our team to enable the feature in your Aiven environment. Keep your eyes peeled as we bring tiered storage into general availability!

Aiven for OpenSearch^® upgraded to version 2.11.1

December saw the upgrade of Aiven for OpenSearch® to version 2.11.1 bringing new and exciting features to the service. With the latest version of OpenSearch, you can customize your searches by chaining together a series of modular processors to modify a query and its results with the general availability of search pipelines. Additional enhancements include integrated alerts and anomaly detection in OpenSearch Dashboards as well as side-by-side search query comparison.

You can try these new enhancements from the Aiven Console by performing a maintenance upgrade on your OpenSearch environments. If you haven’t tried out Aiven for OpenSearch yet, you can start a free trial and get a first hand experience with the new functionality today.

Aiven for PostgreSQL^® adds support for PostgreSQL 16 bringing enhanced performance

In January, we introduced PostgreSQL 16 in Aiven for PostgreSQL® bringing optimized performance and improved monitoring and security. You can benefit from enhanced workload management, more efficient and secure database maintenance, and an overall improved developer experience. Some of the key updates in the latest Postgres version include:

• Improved performance with better query planning and optimized bulk loading
• Enhanced replication for seamless data exchange between cluster nodes and improved high availability, scalability, and disaster recovery
• Enriched developer experience with more SQL/JSON syntax additions
• Improved monitoring with the introduction of pg_stat_io
• Strengthened security and access control with the addition of require_auth for precise client-server authentication

Many organizations already leverage Aiven for PostgreSQL to ensure business critical applications run without interruptions. Digitalparking AG in Switzerland has a popular Parkingpay app using Aiven for PostgreSQL to provide cashless, ticketless parking in over 750 locations in cities, shopping centers, hospitals and multi-story car parks across the country.

“PostgreSQL is now run by Aiven experts. As a result, we’ve never lost any data, version upgrades are seamless and security patching that used to take a day is completed with the click of a button. The inhouse team can now focus on their core job — providing more value to our customers,” says Reto Schläpfer, CEO and CTO at Digitalparking AG.

If you use Aiven for PostgreSQL already, you can run an in-place upgrade to migrate to the newest version. You can also easily test the upgrade first on a fork of the database to be upgraded. If you haven’t tried Aiven for PostgreSQL yet, you can sign up for a free trial here.

What’s cooking in the Aiven kitchen?

What should you expect from Aiven in the coming months? A lot! Our teams work hard to bring many new capabilities to enhance developer productivity, and provide enterprise-grade scalability across all of our technologies so you can stream, store, and serve data with Aiven. Some notable features coming soon with Aiven include:

• AI-powered optimizations with query and index recommendations powered by EverSQL
• More BYOC automation across Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure
• Enterprise security, resilience, and governance along with disk autoscaling
• General availability of tiered storage in Aiven for Apache Kafka
• KRaft-ready Kafka clusters in the Aiven platform
• Custom connectors and streaming governance enhancements in Aiven for Apache Kafka
• Simplified payment options

Be sure to check Aiven Ideas, where you can directly influence the direction of Aiven's product development. Through our forum, you can interact with our product team, give feedback on existing features, post ideas for new features, and vote on the ideas of others. You can also see our public roadmap and get notified when the status of ideas changes, so you can see how they evolve into new features.

How to get started with Aiven?

This was only a glimpse of the new features brought to you by Aiven in the last six months. If you haven’t tried Aiven yet, sign up for a free trial and get a first-hand experience of all the new functionality, or follow our changelog for the full list of updates.

You can also watch our webinar recording covering these exciting announcements: What's New with Aiven: Q4 2023/Q1 2024.