Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

In the high-stakes world of Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) like Expedia, Hopper, Priceline, and Airbnb, seconds matter. A traveler searching for a "beachfront stay in Hawaii" isn't just looking for a room — they are reacting to weather changes, fluctuating flight prices, and social media trends. Traditional travel platforms often rely on stale data: yesterday's search history or last week's preferences. To truly compete, travel platforms must pivot to Real-Time Context Engineering.

Luckily, in Kafka cache invalidation is not an issue, but we still need to name things. Let me tell you a story about naming things in Kafka.

Half a year ago, we launched a free tier cloud Kafka. We have 16,808 clusters so we got curious: what are these builders telling us about the state of Apache Kafka? The headlines this quarter suggest Kafka is dying because the streaming market is consolidating. At Aiven we see the opposite. Kafka is not shrinking. It is spreading outward from enterprise platform teams into the hands of individual builders. We are now seeing >200 new Kafka clusters created per day on the free tier.

When we launched the Free Tier, we made a promise: graduating to a paid tier shouldn’t feel like switching platforms. It should simply feel like tapping “Continue watching in HD”. The Developer Tier for Aiven for Apache Kafka is that upgrade. $35 a month for the serious, ongoing workloads that haven’t yet reached enterprise scale. Everything we said was coming is now live.

Discover Aiven for DataHub: a fully managed, open-source data catalog that gives your teams and AI agents the context they need to find and understand data. According to an MIT study, 95% of AI projects fail to deliver value. I've been thinking about why that number is so stubbornly high, and I've come to believe the answer isn't about models,compute or even data quality in the traditional sense -It's about context.

One space character, one broken backup. See how Aiven’s engineering team traced an OpenSearch k-NN bug to its source and implemented a lasting fix. Backing up your OpenSearch indexes via the Snapshot process is vital for disaster recovery, allowing you to restore the indexed data, cluster configuration and state if something goes wrong.

Unify your code and data. Aiven Apps lets teams deliver real-time applications faster, without building new platforms. No lock-in. No custom pipelines. No egress surprises. We are excited to announce the Limited Availability (LA) launch of Aiven Apps! For over a decade, Aiven has simplified how you store and stream data with an open-source foundation. Over that same time, data volumes have exploded, and so has the friction caused by the distance between where your data is stored and where your code runs.

A free plan with enough RAM for real vector search, k-NN indexing, and long-term memory for your AI projects.

At Aiven, we believe that you should have the freedom to deploy your data wherever your business needs it to be. Whether you are optimizing for performance, compliance, or regional proximity, our goal is to ensure that the underlying infrastructure supports your innovation without friction. Today, we are excited to expand those choices by officially announcing that OVHcloud is now available as a supported infrastructure provider for Aiven customers.

Vector Search GA & SQL Enhancements. Aiven for ClickHouse 25.8 is now available as an Early Availability. This Long-Term Support release introduces lightweight projections as secondary indexes, general availability of vector search with binary quantization, correlated subqueries for broader SQL compatibility, lightweight updates for MergeTree tables, and significant performance and data lakehouse improvements.