Blogs

News Technical — Kafka

General Availability of Apache Kafka and Kafka Connect 2.8.1

Thursday 14th October 2021 by Instaclustr

Instaclustr is pleased to announce the release of Apache Kafka version 2.8.1 on the Intaclustr Managed Platform. The new version is available paired with version 2.8.1 of Kafka Connect. Apache Kafka is the leading distributed event streaming platform and is open source under the Apache 2.0 License. Instaclustr provides our customers managed and supported open source software allowing them to avoid the risks of both vendor lock-in and unsupported software with open source that’s really open source.

Technical — Kafka Technical — Elasticsearch Technical — Postgres

Kafka Connect and Elasticsearch vs. PostgreSQL Pipelines: Initial Performance Results (Pipeline Series Part 8)

Wednesday 13th October 2021 by Paul Brebner

In Part 6 and Part 7 of the pipeline series we took a different path in the pipe/tunnel and explored PostgreSQL and Apache Superset, mainly from a functional perspective—how can you get JSON data into PostgreSQL from Kafka Connect, and what does it look like in Superset. In this blog, we run some initial load tests and find out how the capacity of the original Elasticsearch pipeline compares with the PostgreSQL variant.

Technical — Kafka

Apache Kafka vs Microsoft Azure Service Bus

Monday 11th October 2021 by Ritam Das

In the ever-growing field of big data, Apache Kafka has become a widely adopted distributed streaming platform. From message queuing to event streaming, Apache Kafka delivers on a wide range of use cases. Its high throughput, scalability, and fault tolerance make it the clear-cut choice as an open source event handler. While there can be complexity in adopting and operating Kafka, a company like Instaclustr with our Managed Platform and consulting services can help to make adoption easy and smooth.

Team

Instaclustr Insights: Meet Mari Hsieh

Thursday 7th October 2021 by Instaclustr

Be proactive! You never know what opportunities could be out there if you're not actively making an effort to find them. Reach out and make connections with professionals who can help you reach your goals.

Technical

Horizontal vs Vertical Scaling: Which Scaling Strategy is Right for Me?

Wednesday 6th October 2021 by Jordan Braiuka

We often get questions from customers about the best way to add capacity to their cluster. Is it better to add nodes, or simply to increase the capacity in their nodes? Unfortunately, the truth is there is no best way—like all complex issues in distributed systems, there are benefits and drawbacks to each scaling approach.  […]

Technical

A Brief Guide to NoSQL Databases

Friday 1st October 2021 by Wade Timmer

NoSQL (Not only SQL) databases are known for being “non-relational” meaning they do not always use the schema of rows and columns found in traditional systems. When compared to SQL databases, NoSQL databases have dynamic schemas for more unstructured data. Large amounts of data can be found with simple lookup queries, depending on whatever type of NoSQL database is being used. Data structures used by NoSQL databases are different from SQL because they are built around the type of data they hold. This can make some operations much faster than a default SQL database.

Technical — Postgres News

PostgreSQL 14: PostgreSQL Is Still a Teenager

Thursday 30th September 2021 by Kirk Roybal

This article was a bit harder to write than it would seem on the surface. Amid all the hustle and bustle of the current development cycle, it was hard to find a particular focus of what this effort was all about. Then it finally dawned on me. There wasn’t one.

Technical — Kafka Technical — Postgres

Using Apache Superset to Visualize PostgreSQL JSON Data (Pipeline Series Part 7)

Tuesday 28th September 2021 by Paul Brebner

“Apache Superset is a modern data exploration and visualization platform that is fast, lightweight, intuitive, and loaded with options that make it easy for users of all skill sets to explore and visualize their data, from simple line charts to highly detailed geospatial charts.”

News

Updating Instaclustr’s Open Source Tooling for Apache Cassandra 4.0

Thursday 23rd September 2021 by Stefan Miklosovic

With Apache Cassandra 4.0 recently released, we have updated the open source tooling to support Cassandra 2.0 through 4.0. In some cases that merely required the tool to be tested with Cassandra 4.0, but in others, significant refactoring of the code has occurred to support all three versions. Below I walk through all the different tools that have been updated for Cassandra 4.0. If you want to find out more about what’s new in this release you can read this blog from our CTO Ben Bromhead which pulls together his series of articles on Cassandra 4.0.

News Feature Releases

Instaclustr Announces the General Availability of Managed Apache Cassandra 4.0

Tuesday 21st September 2021 by Instaclustr

Instaclustr is pleased to announce the general availability of Cassandra 4.0 as part of our Managed Cassandra offering on the Instaclustr Managed Platform. Cassandra 4.0 delivers greater performance, unmatched stability, and new auditing capabilities, among other valuable features for the enterprise driven by the Apache Cassandra community. Cassandra 4.0 beta releases have been available in […]

Technical — Kafka

Our Journey to Graviton2 and gp3 Support for Apache Kafka

Wednesday 15th September 2021 by Hendra Gunadi

With the release of AWS’s Graviton2 (ARM) instances and gp3 disks, we at Instaclustr saw an opportunity to further improve the quality of our Managed Apache Kafka offering. So, we embarked on a journey to make the necessary changes for our customers to be able to provision AWS Graviton2 instances paired with gp3 disks. 

News Feature Releases Technical — Kafka

Updates to Instaclustr Support for Earlier Versions of Apache Kafka

Wednesday 15th September 2021 by Instaclustr

As the official release of Kafka 3.0 approaches, we want to advise the retirement of some older versions of Kafka. The Apache Kafka project follows a time-based release plan and aims to support the 3 most recent versions, meaning versions 2.8.x, 2.7.x, and 2.6.x are currently supported by the Apache Kafka project.