(Note: Future iterations of this newsletter will be monthly and much shorter; for our first one, we look back at all of the last quarter.)
Who are we and what do we do?
We’re a team that helps our customers (technical ones, but that’s basically all of them with a platform like Aiven) work with Aiven more easily. We work to boost awareness of Aiven among developers, and boost awareness of developers within Aiven.
More specifically we:
- produce (and review) technical content and videos
- present (and help Aiven present) at tech events
- provide community spaces at meetups and our forum
- work closely with product teams to provide feedback
- connect with customers and prospects
- represent Aiven in the community and industry (appearing on podcasts, live streams, etc)
To learn more about our team, see Aiven DevRel team: enabling success in open source data tech.
Quarter At-A-Glance
Read about some surprise customer testimonials and collaborators in the Community Shout-Outs section.
We delivered talks at events including JSNation, Kafka Summit London, GOTO Chicago, and other community conferences.
Additionally, meetups were held around the world in places like Berlin, London, Helsinki, Milan, Toronto, Singapore.
Our team delivered tons of technical content, including video series on Apache Flink, Redis, and Terraform, and PostgreSQL content on pgvector and a JSONB cheat-sheet, and much more!
Community Shout-Outs
- HUGE thanks to @thinkjrs from Tincre for your unsolicited feedback from a happy customer post!
It made everyone around here smile! 
- Also thank you to Maurice Kherlakian from HookDeck, we SO appreciate your wonderful shout-out for Vendor Appreciation Day!
- INCREDIBLE thanks to our amazing customers Wolt and Wärtsilä who co-hosted meetups with us in Berlin and Helsinki!
- Thank you to Leigh Capili from VMware for your AMAZING Kubernetes Rap at our OSDI Toronto Meetup! (and Engin Diri from Pulumi for capturing the moment!)
- Thanks also to Kat Cosgrove from Dell for co-presenting a fun and informative talk on the history of databases at the same meetup!
- Massive thanks to Diogo Gomes from La Redoute for sharing your cloud transformation story.
- Kudos to Marcel Cutts who took JAW-DROPPING photos at JSNation, including the one below!
Meetups & Events
EMEA
Amsterdam: JSNation @OlenaKutsenko spoke and @Floor emceed at JSNation, an event focusing exclusively on JavaScript developers, attracting 2K+ attendees (in person and virtual). The room was packed for Olena’s talk, with more than 350 people in person, plus over 1,000 remotely.
- Session Recording: Apache Kafka Simply Explained With TypeScript Examples
Berlin OSDI Meetup w/ Wolt @anavasiliuk co-organized this event, with 80+ attendees covering building an event analytics pipeline with Apache Kafka, ksqlDB, and Apache Druid and how Wolt powers Logistics through their ML platform
- Session Recording: Berlin Open Source Data Infrastructure Meetup - May 2023
- Trip report: Open Source Data Infrastructure meetups in Berlin and Helsinki
- Berlin Buzzwords @celestehorgan-aiven and @OlenaKutsenko spoke at this event which covers storing, processing, streaming and searching large amounts of digital data, with a focus on open source software projects.
- Session recording: @OlenaKutsenko - ClickHouse: what is behind the fastest columnar database
- Session recording: @celestehorgan-aiven - Berlin Buzzwords 2023: Building On-Ramps for Non-Code Contributors in Open Source
Helsinki OSDI Meetup w/ Wärtsilä @anavasiliuk co-organized this event with 50+ attendees and covering how Wärtsilä’s Digital Product Development team uses Kafka to serve marine and energy customers and an introduction to TiDB - a distributed SQL database.
- Session recording: N/A
- Trip report: Open Source Data Infrastructure meetups in Berlin and Helsinki
Kafka Summit London @OlenaKutsenko and Olena Babenko gave a talk on The Dark and Dirty Side of Fixing Uneven Partitions.- London OSDI Meetup @BenGamble7 co-hosted the joint meetup with the AI and Deep Learning for Enterprise Meetup.
- The event had about 60 attendees, with Speakers from AWS, Seldon, and Confluent. It was livestreamed as well.
- Trip report: LinkedIn
Milan OSDI Meetup: @ftisiot co-hosted this meetup with talks from Natale Vinto (RedHat) and from an Matteo Maddeddu (AWS Hero)- Milan AWS Day @ftisiot gave a talk about Anomaly Detection with Kafka and Flink (in Italian!)
- London DevoxxUK @OlenaKutsenko gave a talk Using Apache Kafka and OpenSearch to explore Mastodon
- Recording - on YouTube
- Mentioned in Architecture Weekly
- VoxxedDays Luxembourg @OlenaKutsenko
gave a talk Beginners guide to balance your data across Apache Kafka partitions- Recording - Beginners guide to balance your data across Apache Kafka partitions (Olena KUTSENKO) - YouTube
- Sébastien Blanc gave a talk A legacy app enters a Serverless bar
AMER
Toronto OSDI Meetup: @dewan hosted our very first Toronto meetup, alongside the KubeHuddle conference.
- This meetup featured a hilarious Tech rap presentation by Leigh Capili (VMware) followed by a humorous and insightful walk through the historic context of databases by Matty Stratton and Kat Cosgrove (Dell).
- There were 70 registrations, 40 attendees, plenty of interactions (most of them heard about Aiven for the first time).
- Session Recording: view recording
Atlanta Devnexus @OlenaKutsenko delivered a session Beginners guide to balance your data across Apache Kafka partitions.- Open Source Summit North America: @aiven_angie attended this event, which drew 1000+ attendees in the enterprise open source space, attending the OpenSSF Day, meeting with the OpenSearch DevRel + Community team (hi, @KrisFreedain ), and networking with numerous OSPO leaders from the TODO Group.
APAC
Singapore OSDI Meetup: @ftisiot spoke at the local meetup, and attended with booth duty at the AWS Partner Summit ASEAN.
Tokyo OSDI Meetup: Tomohiro Mitani organized this event in concert with RedHat Japan.
DevOps Talks Melbourne: @mattstratton presented the Day 2 keynote for this conference.
Global / Virtual
- The Changelog Podcast: @aiven_angie was on the ANTHOLOGY — Maintaining Maintainers episode as part of GitHub’s Maintainer Month, discussing open source community scaling and sustainability, with a few brief positive mentions of Aiven along the way. Stormy Peters from GitHub and Dawn Foster from VMware are also featured in the episode, which has garnered 17K+ listens so far.
- Arrested DevOps Podcast: @ftisiot was a guest on the Data! Data! Data! episode, digging into real time vs batch, some basics around Kafka, and other data-related topics. And, of course, his thoughts on pineapple on pizza.
- RTA Podcast with Tim Berglund: @OlenaKutsenko was a guest on Tim’s podcast talking about Apache Kafka and all related things - recording
Technical Content
This section covers new technical content published on Aiven’s…
Blog: thought-leadership pieces, announcements
Developer Center: tutorials, example code
YouTube: how-tos, conference talks, meetup recordings, livestreams
(General)
- Improving security: Aiven and GitHub’s secret scanning partnership @dewan, in partnership with @etienne.stalmans, announces Aiven’s partnership with GitHub’s secret scanning program to protect customers’ cloud data infrastructure.
- Meet the Cast: Angie Byron, Director of Community and Proud Crab highlights a member of our team in an employee branding piece.
- What’s new on the Aiven Developer Center: June 2023 by @celestehorgan-aiven posts a content round-up to the blog for wider circulation!
Apache Flink
- @ftisiot created a video series about Apache Flink.
- Aiven for Apache Flink® - a new developer experience for data streaming webinar with Filip Yonov (Product Manager) introducing the new stream processing feature
- Build your first data pipeline with Aiven for Apache Flink®
- Streaming conversion of Apache Kafka topics from JSON to Avro with Apache Flink
- Apache Flink Window Types
- Apache Flink Tumbling Windows
- How to create sliding windows in Apache Flink
- How to create session windows in Apache Flink
Apache Kafka
- Create a streaming dataset for Apache Kafka with Docker (@ftisiot)
- Migrate an Apache Kafka® instance using Apache Kafka® MirrorMaker 2 (@ftisiot) helps customers managing an existing Kafka cluster migrate it to a different service provider (for example, to Aiven
)
ClickHouse®
@OlenaKutsenko dug in this quarter on ClickHouse.
- Introduction to Aiven for ClickHouse shows how to create a service, explore possibilities provided by the Aiven Console, and finally use ClickHouse CLI to create a table, load data and run a couple of sample queries.
- Integrate ClickHouse® with Metabase, an open source BI tool
MySQL
- Create a Spring Boot Application with a MySQL Backend (@dewan) teaches Java developers how to prototype web applications with Aiven.
Migrate a MySQL database to a new version and cloud provider (@dewan) in collaboration with Ryan O’Connor shows how to safely migrate a MySQL database to a new cloud provider, region and version without losing data on the Aiven platform.
PostgreSQL®
- Serhat Yanikoglu, @ftisiot, and @tibs_at_aiven collaborated on a one-two punch announcement + tutorial for our new pgvector capability which provides vector similarity search capabilities (useful to compare machine learning embeddings).
- Add caching to your PostgreSQL® app using Redis®*: (@celestehorgan-aiven and @tibs_at_aiven) Learn how to use Redis as a caching layer for a web application that uses PostgreSQL as a backend.
- Use PostgreSQL® DOMAIN rules to validate columns of data @ftisiot teaches how to validate your data as it goes into your databases to improve data quality
- PostgreSQL® JSONB Cheatsheet: Complete & Fast Lookup Guide (@ftisiot) contains a 1-pager visual cheat-sheet with tons of helpful commands.
- PostgreSQL monitoring with InfluxDB and Grafana dashboards (@ftisiot)
Redis
- .Sébastien Blanc created a video series showcasing various features of Redis
- Add caching to your PostgreSQL® app using Redis®* with support from @celestehorgan-aiven and @tibs_at_aiven.
Terraform
- @dewan and Sébastien Blanc created a YouTube series about combining Terraform + various Aiven managed technologies.
- Connect Apache Kafka® to OpenSearch® with Terraform
- Deploy PostgreSQL® services to multiple clouds and regions using Terraform
- Using Terraform with Github Actions
- Deploy PostgreSQL® service with custom configurations using Terraform
- Enforce fine-grained policy control across your data infrastructure
- Import your existing data platform using Terraform (@dewan) this tutorial covers how to take an existing data platform from ad-hoc chaos and move to version-controlled management.
Until next time!
- Come say hi to us at an event near you!
- Learn tech topics from Aiven Developer Center and videos.
- Read the latest Aiven announcements on our blog.
- Come chat with us on Twitter and LinkedIn.