Instaclustr Open Sources Shotover, a High Performance L7 Data-Layer Proxy for Improving Database Operations and Interoperability
November 08, 2021

Instaclustr Open Sources Shotover, a High Performance L7 Data-Layer Proxy for Improving Database Operations and Interoperability

Continuing its commitment to open source principles and community contributions, Instaclustr is making its Shotover proxy available as free and open source software

REDWOOD CITY, Calif – November 8, 2021 Instaclustr, which helps organizations deliver applications at scale by managing their open source data infrastructure, today announced that the Shotover proxy project is now available as fully open source software. Shotover is a high performance L7 data-layer proxy for controlling, managing and modifying the flow of database requests in transit. The open source community and others interested can find the latest release of Shotover from GitHub.

Most database operational issues stem from using data models, queries, or even databases with behaviors that are not quite suitable for the workload at hand. These basic suitability mismatches often result in slow queries for certain keys, inefficient queries, overlarge and inefficient tables (due to a non-suitable data model), overly frequent queries (due to hot partitions), database slowdowns, and more. Unfortunately, these issues tend to present only in production environments – when mitigation requires difficult application or schema changes. These issues can leave teams worried that they ought to have chosen a different database, but with no easy path to revisiting that decision.

Shotover alleviates these challenges by decoupling applications from data locality, performance and storage. The solution provides predefined transforms that teams can use to modify, route, and control queries from any number of sources to a similar number of upstream databases. Users can build chains of predefined query transformations to achieve their goal behaviors, enabling immediate changes to queries and data storage options with no need to alter or redeploy applications. 

Shotover also solves many operational, compliance, and interoperability issues that teams working with multiple databases commonly encounter. Specifically, Shotover can provide:

  • Field level data encryption, with common key management across databases.
  • Data routing to multiple databases to leverage particular query or performance capabilities (for example: indexing data in Redis with Elasticsearch, or easily caching Cassandra data in Redis. 
  • Data routing or replication across regions (useful in scenarios where databases lack native cross-region support, or are gated off by proprietary “open core” limitations).
  • A common audit and AuthZ/AuthN point, for achieving SOX/PCI/HIPAA compliance.

Shotover has been running in production at Instaclustr, supporting our multi-region replication capability for Redis Clusters.

Quotes 

“Our R&D team developed Shotover with the goal of making life easier for teams in scenarios where their desired database operations and data workload just don’t quite fit,” said Conor Brosnan, Software Engineer at Instaclustr. “We’re glad to give back to the communities around Cassandra, Kafka, Redis, Postgres, and the other open source data infrastructure technologies we support by offering this new open source project, and especially for those operating multiple databases who can use Shotover to help them work well together.”

“We define our business at Instaclustr by our commitment to providing powerful open source technologies in their pure open source form – free of open core or proprietary lock-in,” said Ben Bromhead, Chief Technology Officer at Instaclustr. “With Shotover, we’re honored to share an open source project with a community we know will put it to good use and help it to grow. We eagerly invite anyone interested to explore, try, and contribute to Shotover.”

About Instaclustr

Instaclustr helps organizations deliver applications at scale through its managed platform for open source technologies such as Apache Cassandra®, Apache Kafka®, Apache SparkTM, RedisTM, OpenSearchTM, Apache ZooKeeperTM, and PostgreSQL®. Instaclustr combines a complete data infrastructure environment with hands-on technology expertise to ensure ongoing performance and optimization. By removing infrastructure complexity, Instaclustr enables companies to focus internal development and operational resources on building cutting-edge, customer-facing applications at a lower cost. Instaclustr customers include some of the largest and most innovative Fortune 500 companies.

For more information, visit Instaclustr.com and follow us @Instaclustr.



Spin up a cluster in minutes