Back in August, Aerospike announced they were open-sourcing their signature platform. At the beginning of December, they were back again with news of a record-breaking Google Compute Engine Benchmark. Now, to round off what has been an exceptional year for the flash-optimised, in-memory NoSQL database, they’ve released a whole raft of updates to their database.
The full announcement is, in a word, extensive- you can read the whole developer’s Christmas wishlist of updates here. We recently discussed the announcements with Aerospike’s CTO Brian Bulkowski; he highlighted three key developments which he believes are instrumental in fuelling the real-time applications of tomorrow.
1. A Whole Host of New Clients
One of the key headlines from the announcement is new clients for Python, PHP, Go and Ruby, plus a whole host of upgrades for Aerospike’s Java, Node.js, .NET / C# clients. Bulkowski highlighted that the vast range of clients was a demonstration of Aerospike’s commitment to their community.
“In the polyglot language world, you can’t just have a world-class database; you have to be in the community, you have to have different connectors, you have to be giving back to your community,” he explained. “Monica [Pal, Aerospike CMO]’s catchphrase for this release is ‘It’s about what we’re giving to developers, and what developers are giving to us’. It’s about having a great Ruby client, having a great PHP client, having a great Go client- we’re having a huge amount of success with Go, which is a little underappreciated as a language. On paper, it looks a little like a laundry list- but it means to our communities, is that they know we have them covered.”
2. Hadoop Integration
The integration of InputFormat allows Hadoop tools to analyse data stored in Aerospike, without performing ETL from HDFS. Aerospike’s Indexed MapReduce also allows you to analyse specific subsets of data, eliminating the need for the large data lake analysis typically offered by HDFS.
As Bulkowski explained, “The nature of analytics is, once you’ve written your analysis, you don’t want to have to do it again- it’s troublesome, it’s error-prone- you want to use the tools you have. By backing the Hadoop tooling- even though we know our own tooling is better, faster and more capable- being compatible when it comes to analytics is really a benefit. Our key value comes from being row-oriented, rather than a streaming store like HDFS- so what we looked at was, what can we give to an analytics community as a row-oriented database? The benefit is not having to ETL- being able to run those jobs directly on your database in a safe and sane fashion.”
3. Docker Containers
As we have previously reported, taking a developer-centric approach in 2014 has become synonymous with Docker support. Bulkowski was certainly excited by the rapid development of containerisation, but was keen to stress the technology has a long way to go before it reaches maturation. “The containerisation of both the data centres and also the cloud are still in their infancy,” he remarked. “From a technical perspective, I think it’s a great idea. Containerisation definitely has the potential to reset the game in terms of high-IO applications like us. In terms of being in the community, having a Docker image that people can start playing with is great- but it’s still early days.”
These three headlines only really scratch the surface of this extensive announcement; Aerospike have also announced enhancements to their enterprise security, a raft of storage and performance improvements, and 33 key community contributions- just three months after going open source. I would urge you to give the full list a read here, and to keep your eyes peeled for further Aerospike innovation in 2015.
(Image credit: Aerospike)
