How to constantly improve your service performance... by doing nothing

There’s an important part of Aiven’s service offering that isn’t very visible to our customers, and that's ensuring that you get the best possible price/performance ratio with Aiven services. It's not just for new services, either. We constantly fine-tune the performance of all services throughout their lifecycle.

Moore's Law is over six decades old, but it still holds true – computer hardware continues to evolve very fast. Cloud computing is no exception.

Cloud platform providers keep introducing new virtual machine instance types. As a result of this development work, different clouds have evolved different instance types that are all optimized for different use cases. This makes it really hard to stay up-to-date and know which instance types are the best match for a given data infrastructure service.

At Aiven, we take this burden away from our customers.

You may have noticed that our service plans define the number of virtual machines, CPU’s and memory on those virtual machines, and storage included in the plan. But did you notice that they do not lock you to a specific instance type?

Our team tracks the evolution of hardware. We are continuously evaluating which instance types bring the optimal price/performance ratio for specific services. When we find a better instance type, we’ll bring it into production, and we will base all new services created on this new instance type. Old services also switch to the new instance type the very next time they receive maintenance (updating the version, applying a security patch, scaling the service up or down...). All you see as a customer is that the performance of your service just got better - with no extra cost or time spent!

As an example of this process, we recently moved to new ARM based instance types in AWS for our Redis service. According to our benchmarking, this typically improves Redis performance by up to 10%. If you are one of our Redis customers you may already have seen this improved performance. If not, then you will soon.

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