Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Win $5,000 by building a cool project using Aiven’s new free tier Kafka, and sharing it online with or.

Introducing Aiven’s New PG AI Editor - A simpler, faster, developer-friendly way to work with PostgreSQL.

Traversing the Gap Between Sparse and Dense Vector Spaces.

How I used Aiven's free Kafka tier to monitor my smart bird feeder in real-time.

Fixing Kafka’s 80% problem with a serious fully managed free Kafka.

We benchmarked Diskless Kafka (KIP-1150) with 1 GiB/s in, 3 GiB/s out workload across three AZs. The cluster ran on just six m8g.4xlarge machines, sitting at <30% CPU, delivering ~1.6 seconds P99 end-to-end latency - all while cutting infra spend from ≈$3.32 M a year to under $288k a year. That’s a >94% cloud cost reduction. Extending Apache Kafka does come with an explicit tax.

When it comes to text search, PostgreSQL offers a surprisingly rich set of tools. Initially, text search capabilities were quite basic, often relying on the LIKE operator. This is inefficient for large amounts of text and lacks the nuance that comes with language. A major breakthrough came with the introduction of the built-in tsquery and tsvector data types, along with the associated functions, as part of PostgreSQL's core distribution. But tsquery is not the only option.

For ClickHouse to achieve the speed it's known for, it has historically relied on a trigger-based and incremental architecture for materialized views. This architecture is known to be very efficient but lacks flexibility, such as when working with data that needs to be backfilled rather than append-only.

We’ve all built the standard RAG pipeline: chunk data, embed it, store it, retrieve it. It works… maybe. Just like LLMs have added a thinking mode for better results, we can add a bit of thinking to our RAG pipelines with agentic RAG using PostgreSQL and n8n.

Aiven is introducing a new pricing plan for Aiven for PostgreSQL services. Starting at $8 USD per month, the Developer tier offers more storage, so you can scale up your free PostgreSQL service in a cost-effective way. Unlike the Free tier, services on the Developer tier are not automatically powered off if inactive. The Developer tier also automatically includes Basic support services. More information on the Developer tier is available in the Aiven docs.