Blogs

Technical — Redis

Redis Mirroring Now in Preview on the Instaclustr Managed Platform

Tuesday 30th March 2021 by Instaclustr

Today Instaclustr is pleased to announce that our Redis Mirroring solution is available in preview with Instaclustr for Redis on the Instaclustr Managed Platform. Mirroring enables businesses to cope with unexpected events such as cloud outages by allowing for a resilient, geographically distributed cache architecture that can handle high availability requirements. Additionally, a geographically distributed […]

Technical — Elasticsearch Technical

Complete Overview of the ELK Stack

Monday 29th March 2021 by Instaclustr

Answering Key Questions About the ELK Stack Organizations are increasingly turning to the ELK Stack to search and analyze massive data volumes. ELK is an acronym derived from the three technologies that formed the initial stack: Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana. Some are incorporating the stack’s search capabilities into apps and websites, providing simple, fast ways […]

Technical — Kafka

Apache Kafka MirrorMaker 2 (MM2) Part 2: Practice

Thursday 18th March 2021 by Paul Brebner

In part 1 of this blog series, we focused on MirrorMaker 2 theory (Kafka replication, architecture, components and terminology) and invent some MirrorMaker 2 rules. In this part, we will be more practical, and try out Instaclustr’s managed MirrorMaker 2 service and test the rules out with some experiments.

Technical — Kafka

Apache Kafka MirrorMaker 2 (MM2) Part 1: Theory

Tuesday 16th March 2021 by Paul Brebner

In this new two-part blog series we’ll turn our gaze to the newest version of MirrorMaker 2 (MM2), the Apache Kafka cross-cluster mirroring, or replication, technology. MirrorMaker 2 is built on top of the Kafka Connect framework for increased reliability and scalability, and is suitable for more demanding geo-replication use cases including migration, backup, disaster […]

Technical Technical — Redis

Redis vs Memcached

Thursday 25th February 2021 by Shane Ducksbury

Caching is an important step in increasing the performance of many applications. It can be difficult to determine which caching solution is the best for your use case. Two likely contenders that will often make an appearance in your search for the answer are Redis vs Memcached. In the green corner is Memcached (est. 2003), […]

Team

Instaclustr Insights: Meet Jackson Fleming

Tuesday 23rd February 2021 by Instaclustr

Instaclustr Insights provide meaningful insights into team members’ work lives. This time it is Jackson Fleming – Software Engineer, Instaclustr. What does your role at Instaclustr entail? I’m a Software Engineer in the Admin Services team within our Engineering department. We build and maintain the tools and infrastructure that our support staff (which we refer to […]

Technical Technical — Elasticsearch

Elastic Beats and Where They Fit With ELK Stack

Monday 22nd February 2021 by Shane Ducksbury

After my last blog post about Logstash, Elasticsearch, and Kibana, I wanted to investigate something else I kept coming across during my Logstash research: Elastic Beats. Beats initially appeared to me to be a way to send data to Elasticsearch, the same as Logstash, leading me to wonder how Beats is different and where it […]

News Technical — Cassandra Technical

Security Advisory: CVE-2020-17516

Sunday 7th February 2021 by Instaclustr

Earlier this week, a vulnerability was published to the Cassandra users mailing list which describes a flaw in the way Apache Cassandra nodes perform encryption in some configurations.  The vulnerability description is reproduced here: “Description: When using ‘dc’ or ‘rack’ internode_encryption setting, a Cassandra instance allows both encrypted and unencrypted connections. A misconfigured node or […]

News Technical

Instaclustr Terraform Provider Added to Terraform Provider Registry

Monday 1st February 2021 by Thomas Griffiths

Instaclustr is pleased to announce that our popular Terraform provider is now published to the official Terraform providers registry. This makes the provider publicly available for browsing and searching via the registry interface, as well as available to install via the CLI. Terraform is a popular framework that enables infrastructure as code (IAC) capabilities, allowing […]

Team

Instaclustr Insights: Meet Alexander Jurkovic

Friday 29th January 2021 by Instaclustr

Instaclustr Insights provide meaningful insights into team members’ work lives. This time it is Alexander Jurkovic– HR and Recruitment Support Officer, Instaclustr. What does your role at Instaclustr entail? My role at Instaclustr primarily involves the end-to-end recruitment and onboarding process of new employees into the company, along with supporting the rest of the Human […]

Technical Technical — Kafka

Scaling Kafka Connect Streaming Data Processing (Pipeline Series Part 5)

Monday 25th January 2021 by Paul Brebner

In Part 4 of this blog series we started exploring Kafka Connector task scalability by configuring a new scalable load generator for our real-time streaming data pipeline, discovering relevant metrics, and configuring Prometheus and Grafana monitoring. We are now ready to increase the load and scale the number of Kafka Connector tasks and demonstrate the […]

Technical Technical — Kafka

Monitoring Kafka Connect Pipeline Metrics with Prometheus (Pipeline Series Part 4)

Thursday 21st January 2021 by Paul Brebner

In Part 3 of this blog series, we looked at Apache Camel Kafka Connector to see if it is more or less robust than the connectors we tried in Part 1 and Part 2. Now we start exploring Kafka Connect task scaling. In this blog we will: Change the data source so we can easily […]