What is Aiven?

A brief history

The idea of Aiven came from four Finnish developers called Oskari, Hannu, Heikki and Mika. In their everyday work, they had seen that setting up and maintaining databases was a pain for people who just wanted to develop applications and code in peace. (This was 2015; there were some providers already out there but none that answered to their criteria or made the experience of using them smooth and painless.)

They felt that data shouldn’t be locked in to one vendor and that the underlying technology should be developed in the open. The best cloud data management tools should be available for anyone who needs them.

They wanted to make developers’ lives better, and this was the way to do it.

So they started Aiven.

The founders had three core principles for building this fresh-faced company and platform: Work hard to create simple solutions for complex problems. Automate everything. And hire the best people.

Today, we articulate our values as

Openness - Open source is our beating heart and nurtures an atmosphere of inspiration, respect and open-mindedness.

Ownership - We take pride in our achievements, empower each other through responsibility, and aspire to learn and grow.

Courage - We embrace challenges, take bold risks, celebrate our successes and learn from our failures – together.

These are our north star in shaping the way we work and bringing like-minded people together at Aiven.

Aiven is…

The company I always wanted to work for

Like our employees, our customers are also a global, diverse crowd. We work with more than a thousand companies worldwide, from the US to Indonesia, from South Africa to Finland.

What does Aiven do?

Aiven offers data infrastructure elements as a service. We don’t sell licenses, and we don’t own servers - we manage people’s data infrastructure for them.

Data infrastructure refers to all the pieces in a company’s IT system dealing with data. It can include

• Databases for storing information
• Data brokers for passing data to and from other systems
• Visualization solutions
• Analysis solutions
• Monitoring and metrics solutions
• Search engines
• Cache
• Connectors for integrating into other systems

Aiven is…

A team of highly talented people making something disruptive a reality.

A company may decide to operate all these pieces themselves, or outsource all of them, or a mix of the two. Aiven can provide a full solution with all these pieces.

The actual software is open source and it’s hosted at major cloud providers. To make life easier for our customers, they pay for the hosting with the same invoice as they pay Aiven for the infrastructure management.

With Aiven, the customer’s developers can focus on the business of building applications instead of worrying about infrastructure:

• No maintenance.
• No manual upgrades.
• No hassle scaling or migrating services.
• No confusion about how much you’re paying each month.
• No restrictions on switching to another provider later.

Read about actual use cases on our case studies page!

To take a closer look at Aiven's services, you too can sign up for a free trial.

Aiven is open source

Open source is at the heart of what we do.

By using open source software (OSS), we and our customers make sure that they never get locked up in a vendor relationship. Their data remains theirs, and if they ever feel like it, they should be free to pack it up and leave us--although of course we do our best to offer service that makes them want to stay!

Open source has many other benefits, too. The development happens out in the open, which means the bar of access is low, and the tools themselves are available for anyone who needs them.

The developer base is huge and global, and there are always many eyes on any piece of code. As a result, security and reliability is better in the open source world than for proprietary software.

Aiven is…

Paying back, paying forward.

Building something meaningful from the ground up.

Aiven is sustainable

The efficient storage and movement of data is crucial for modern life, but at the same time, storing and moving data takes up massive amounts of global resources. Who controls those resources and whether they are squandered is a real issue that Aiven wants to tackle.

Access to and control of data is an issue of equality and equity. Aiven operates on top of open source technologies, and we do our best to democratize them. We want to lower the threshold for everyone to build great apps - not only those who had the opportunity to attend universities and raise seed money.

But that is not enough. Faced with climate change, we need to think carefully about where and how resources are used. Cloud platforms are by default more energy efficient than private data centers, but we can do more. Aiven aims to make energy consumption in the technology sector more environmentally sound by both changing the energy mix and controlling the overall energy consumption.

We are Aiven

Aiven is more than a data infrastructure platform--Aiven is an idea, a company, and a community.

Aiven is…

A way of life

Aiven cares about its employees and about the work that we all do. Employees say Aiven is all about autonomy and respect for people.

At Aiven, our generous learning opportunities give us the space to learn in our everyday life. And that's what life in a hyperscaler often is like. We get to create an incredible growth journey while making the complex problems simple. It's almost impossible to be a part of that journey and NOT to constantly learn, with amazing colleagues.

Actually, a third of new joiners say they applied to work at Aiven because the Aiveners they met impressed them with their professionalism, energy and drive to have an impact. When we go out into the world and talk to customers, that really shows.

Aiven is…

Once in a lifetime team

An amazing learning experience

All in all, people enjoy working at Aiven and keep recommending it to their friends.

Aiven is…

Full of love and caring

I feel like I’ve come home

And the crab?

One of the most frequently asked questions is about our crab logo. Well, the name is Crabby... But join us to find out more!

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If you just want to stay find out about our service updates, follow our changelog.

Are you're still looking for a managed data platform? Sign up for a free trial at https://console.aiven.io/signup!
Struggling with the management of your data infrastucture? Sign up now for your free trial at https://console.aiven.io/signup!