Create trust and value with Aiven

I spent the majority of my career at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, where I worked on many classified, large scale data problems for various government agencies including the NSA, CIA and DARPA.

I then went into the public retail sector for a bit to ensure I didn’t miss the cloud wave. After that, I landed at a large financial firm in the midst of a migration from on-premises to the cloud. While there, I got a call from an Aiven recruiter:

“Hey you have experience with all the technologies that we offer, would you be interested in being a Solution Architect in Sales?”
“Sales? I’m an engineer, are you sure you got the right guy?”
“Yes.”
“Do I need to support the software? Do I get paged on weekends?”
“No.”
“Then sign me up twice!”

And that is how I stumbled into being a Pre-Sales Solution Architect. And let me tell you, I absolutely love it! Talking with engineers every day and helping them become successful by empathizing with similar experiences is simply awesome.

Usually I find myself talking about the building and optimizing of data infrastructure, or different strategies for security, hybrid and multi-cloud. This time, however, I want to change it up a bit.

While all of the above are important aspects of an organization's cloud strategy, you can’t get any of them accomplished without people and empowering them with the right tools. Let’s talk about that.

Building Trust

There’s a Nike slogan from the early 1990’s (showing my age here) for the Air Huarache sneaker: "Have you hugged your foot today?" Since sometimes we take our feet for granted, why not show them a bit of love by buying these sneakers?

But what does a shoe ad about feet-hugging have to do with the cloud? How can this relate to organizations? Cloud services? People?

What I’m about to say is not novel, but some organizations need to learn this. And some just need a gentle reminder from time to time.

All too often companies have gone out, executed a lengthy recruitment process, and done all of their due diligence to hire staff that are the best at what they do. Companies trust engineers and architects to write code and build systems that create value for their customers, and drive company revenue and shareholder value.

But why is it so often the case that engineers are not included or trusted when procuring the software or services that they will use every day? Or worse yet, are forced to use software that management has purchased without any input from them? I’m sure that at least some of you are nodding right now.

Trust your engineers and architects! They intrinsically have the company's best interests in mind.

Speaking from experience, as an engineer and architect, it was always my goal to build robust software that didn’t page me on nights and weekends. I wasn’t out to use the latest gimmick or buzzword of the day. But I was always looking for the right tool for the job, because it created stability for me, my teams, my customers and my organization.

I wanted to ensure that my nights and weekends were spent with friends and family, not hunkered over a keyboard looking at stacktraces. I feel most engineers can empathize with my position, and want to use technology that makes their lives easier, more stable and allow them to get the job done in a consistent and repeatable fashion.

I challenge you to continue to give that trust to your engineers and architects, ensuring they feel valued at your company.

So, back to “Have you hugged your foot today”. I’m not going to ask you to hug an engineer, but I will ask you to ponder the question: “Have I trusted my engineers today?”

Open Source Trends

In 2021, our industry saw an inflection point when open source systems became more popular than commercial proprietary systems. More than 80% of enterprises are choosing Apache Kafka over an alternative commercial streaming service. Wow!

This isn’t a fly by night trend that companies are jumping onto open source technologies, but rather a trend that has been slow and methodically becoming a bedrock of our industry.

Aiven offers 100% open source managed databases as a service (DBaaS) with no proprietary hooks. This means that what we offer is the exact same code that you could download and stand up in your own on-premises environment or cloud account, except you don’t have to.

Wouldn’t you want to put your faith and trust in a company that was born out of these trends?

Aiven open source House of Services

The Aiven open source House of Services offers all of these services supporting various use cases such as stream, OLTP, caching, NoSQL, time-series and large scale analytics. Aiven can support all of your use cases under one roof with tools such as Kafka, Flink, PostgreSQL, Redis and now Clickhouse.

Aiven has built a consistent platform for deploying and managing all of these services across 5 cloud vendors (AWS, GCP, Azure, Digital Ocean, UpCloud) allowing for over 120 regions around the globe.

All services under one roof makes your life easier by combining legal agreements, security assessments and support contracts into one sign-up.

Aiven takes care of everything:

• Setup and provisioning
• High Availability
• Security
• Monitoring

We make it easy. Subscribe once. Deploy many. Scale in any direction. You can scale either individual services or across clouds.

Building Engineering Value

Aiven can help your company grow. Your organization will be placing intrinsic trust in Aiven for your critical business needs, and Aiven will be with you every step of the way.

As a side note, I always find it funny how organizations list buildings, computers, and furniture as assets on their balance sheets, but nobody ever lists their data as an “asset” on their balance sheet. Are you kidding me? Where would you be without your data? Aiven fully understands that data is the lifeblood of a business and completely understands the trust you place in us.

As a company that was founded 6 years by 4 friends with engineering backgrounds, Aiven knows where your engineers are coming from. We’ve been in those same trenches. Aiven practices what we preach and this is why companies such as Activision Blizzard, Priceline, Toyota, and the Government of the UK, have all chosen Aiven.

So, we know what it takes to build successful engineering projects from the ground up. We built Aiven!

Aiven up your engineers

Aiven allows your engineers to do their best work in all ways.

Rapid prototyping - fail fast

Not sure if Apache Flink will meet your Analytic Streaming needs? No need to spend 2-3 weeks learning how to install and harden a Flink deployment, simply spin up a Flink service in Aiven and within minutes you will be writing SQL statements against your live data streaming through Kafka. This allows you to make decisions quickly, yet be diligent at the same time.

Consistency across services is paramount within Aiven

By providing a consistent REST, Terraform, CLI and console interface for all services that we provide, across cloud and regions. No more worrying about what types of VM’s and disks to purchase from cloud providers to run Kafka, Aiven does this for you. This allows your organization to consistently grow by building common capabilities across teams.
In addition, with so many proprietary cloud services per cloud vendor, how do you ensure a consistent SLA in a mutli-cloud environment? We do it for you by providing a single public SLA for all services no matter where you deploy them.

Add business value

Spend time on business problems, not hardening infrastructure.
Building on the Flink example, engineers can now iterate on adding value without having to worry about the arduous task of maintaining systems under ever increasing load. Do you really want to worry if your system will fail under the stress of Cyber Monday? Of course not! Aiven services will scale to meet your demands.

Simply put, Aiven lets you get the important things DONE!

Aiven: A developer focused platform

So how does this all tie back to the idea of trust and value?

Well, with Aiven, you are going to have a wide range of tactical benefits to build value within your business, technical differences that make everyone’s lives a bit better.

100% open source - no strings attached

Aiven allows you to get the best of the cloud, as many eyes make all bugs small.

Aiven contributes back upstream: nearly 4% of our workforce is solely dedicated to giving back and contributing to open source projects. And not just the projects that we offer but a wide variety.

Predictable TCO with stable 100% all inclusive pricing

Read my lips: No Networking Cost for ingress or egress traffic EVER.

Aiven only charges for computation, RAM and storage, so your services can have a consistent TCO month over month.

Gone are the days of having to figure out what are your expected IOPS or network throughput for a system that you haven’t even built yet.

Enterprise grade services at no extra cost

All Aiven services have High Availability, no downtime for upgrades, downgrades, or patching, and simple 1 click migration across clouds. All this is included by default with every Aiven service.

Because we do not charge for networking, cross-cloud disaster recovery (DR) strategies are now reality. You can be multi-cloud right out of the gate with Aiven from day one with a consistent TCO.

External integration such as Datadog and Prometheus, as well as GCP Cloud Logging are some of the endpoints that allow you to integrate into your existing ecosystem. Again all of this is accomplished with zero egress networking costs.

100% consistent automation across all services, clouds and regions is accomplished with Terraform, Kubernetes and REST APIs. This allows for simple infrastructure as code for auditing and ease of use by only having to learn one platform.

Empowered Engineers and DevOPS personnel

We have heard from our customers over and over again that Aiven also fosters happy engineers, because they can work on a consistent platform, producing more value to your business.

When they are empowered and consulted in larger decisions, engineering staffs feel valued, cultivating higher productivity and innovation

Aiven makes developers’ lives better, one engineer at a time.

Dedicated VPC Peering

I want to give a simple explanation to one of the security postures that Aiven offers. As we have heard, cloud providers have formidable IAM capabilities, challenging even the most expert security engineers to avoid introducing security holes into your organization.

Aiven provides simple, yet robust, security strategies supporting public endpoints and BYOC, all the way to HIPAA and PCI enhanced security environments.

This diagram depicts our most standard deployment that our customers use which is VPC Peering. In addition, this diagram shows an optional firewall per service allowing connectivity along both the VPC peered network (center of diagram) as well as a whitelist of IP addresses for data sources outside the VPC.

Aiven makes this complex networking setup simple to configure: systems external to the VPC, like IOT sensors, can publish information directly to your Aiven services.

Aiven builds solutions

Aiven offers the best open source tools to build solutions for your business. As the open source trend in the industry continues, we are seeing more and more open source frameworks coming out today that rely on integration with persistence, metrics or logging tools.

Why choose an open source framework yet use proprietary infrastructure? Does that really make sense? I don’t think it does.

As an example, Wordpress can be easily configured to point at an Aiven for MySQL and Aiven for Caching services for tracking users and caching content. Additionally, add monitoring of your Aiven services with Aiven for M3 + Aiven for Grafana to ensure that your services are always running healthy and meeting your customers demands.

One of the newer kids on the block to open source software is the Temporal.io framework. This framework offers a microservice orchestration platform for managing modern workflow applications. Temporal requires state persistence, monitoring and logging. With simple integration with Aiven services such as Aiven for PostgreSQL, Aiven for M3 and Aiven for OpenSearch, you have immediately built a robust data infrastructure for persisting Temporal workflows.

Imagine having to set up and manage all of this infrastructure on your own, harden it and scale it as your workflow grows? No thanks, let Aiven’s Terraform providers do this for all of your integrated solutions.

Aiven can be your data cloud

I hope that you have learned that Aiven is a world class provider of managed services and that we take great pride in putting your engineers' experience and your data at the core of our company's values, all the while giving back to the open source community.

P.S.

Go to https://console.aiven.io/signup for a free trial with $300 in credits. Happy architecting!

P.P.S

In the meantime, make sure you follow our changelog and blog RSS feeds or our LinkedIn and Twitter accounts to stay up-to-date with product and feature-related news.

Further reading

• Life after the GOV.UK PaaS
• Aiven for PostgreSQL® available in DigitalOcean