Time to take stock as Aiven goes 2.0

Last year, we quietly embarked on a major overhaul of the Aiven brand. The purpose? To reflect our evolution from a small, Finnish startup offering PostgreSQL as a Service to a larger, international one providing 6 open-source services in 5 clouds across 67 regions.

Don’t worry, we’re still Finnish and the crab stays. After all, these are what anchor our brand and provide the all-important continuity as we forge ahead into uncharted territory.

Nonetheless, we have done a lot since Aiven’s inception in January of 2016 and even more so in 2017. Before you explore our new website, let’s take stock of what we accomplished last year and peak into what we plan to accomplish this year!

Building to Aiven 2.0, a year of firsts | 2017

In our second year, we focused on building up our services and coverage. We were able to accomplish a lot of firsts, whether bringing a major version release to market first, establishing ourselves as an open-source service leader, or expanding our operations. For a startup competing with well-estabilished brands, these were no small feat.

1. The first to offer production-ready PostgreSQL 10

As a result, Aiven customers were the first to get access to the many performance enhancements and improved data distribution across nodes that PG10 promised across all major cloud providers.

2. The first to support local SSDs for PostgreSQL

In some of our tests, PostgreSQL instances with local SSDs demonstrated up to a 400% increase in performance over those with network SSDs: good for databases of all sizes, but especially those with enterprise scale.

3. Demonstrated Aiven as the fastest provider of PostgreSQL

For PGConf EU ‘17, we benchmarked PostgreSQL across different cloud and DBaaS providers. Most interesting were the results of our comparison between RDS, Aurora, and Aiven for PostgreSQL.

4. Became the #1 provider of managed Apache Kafka

Available in Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, DigitalOcean, and UpCloud over 67 regions, no other Apache Kafka provider offers its customers such flexibility in where their clusters are managed and hosted.

5. Added service integrations to increase the power of Aiven for Apache Kafka.

Now, Aiven customers can visualize and set up alerts for their Aiven for Kafka data by integrating with Aiven for InfluxDB and Grafana. Setting the integrations up is simple and only takes a few minutes to set up.

6. Established our first international office in Boston, MA

A global service requires a global footprint. Due to North America’s geographic location and that of our client base, establishing an office in the U.S. under Aiven, Inc was the logical next step.

The year of Aiven 2.0, hitting our stride | 2018

Entering our third year, we've set a solid pace that will see us adding more integrations to our current services, adding additional services, and demonstrating our commitment to data security. 2018 will be a year of expansion, but also one of refinement.

1. Adding support for Datadog

Although our Aiven InfluxDB and Grafana service integrations essentially provide the same functionality as Datadog, many of our clients are established users of the latter, which is why we will be providing support in Q1.

2. Adding Cassandra and other services

Starting with a Cassandra Beta by end of Q1, we will add a number of popular and horizontally scalable services throughout 2018 to increase our platform's functionality and secure our role as the premier cloud database hub.

3. Adding support for Kafka MirrorMaker

Cross-region replication is important for interdependent clusters, especially those that administrators are using as fail-safes. In short, it’s important and we’re making it available.

4. Fleshing out Aiven service integrations

Now, Aiven Kafka users can access pre-made dashboards to visualize their metadata and set alerts with InfluxDB and Grafana. We will follow-up with Aiven PostgreSQL and OpenSearch over the year.

5. Attaining ISO 27001 Certification

Information security is at the heart of everything we do, which is why we started the ISO 27001 certification process in late 2017 and plan on receiving full certification mid 2018.

Building from Aiven 2.0, increasing our pace | Beyond 2018

It's hard to accurately predict where Aiven will be a year from now. But, we know what we'll do: practice the philosophy that got us to today, one that is focused on providing services that are usable, reliable, relevant, and secure.

Our foundation firm, our customers happy, and our brand confidently facing the future, we are in the ideal posture to position ourselves as the leading cloud database platform and earning a spot at the table when companies consider or reconsider their cloud strategy.

So beyond 2018? Who know, but the pace will be furious. Make sure you stay up-to-date by subscribing to our blog and changelog RSS feeds. And in the meantime? Be sure to explore and enjoy our new website!

<div class="col-xs-12 text-center"> <a class="button gradient" href="https://aiven.io/" target="_blank"> Start at the homepage! </a> </div>

Further reading

• Datadog meets Aiven