Aerospike Adopts Cloud Native Standards with Cloud Offering

Organizations that want the benefit of a high-performance NoSQL database but don’t want to spend a lot of time managing it may want to check out the new Aerospike Cloud, which features a Kubernetes operator and other cloud components from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

More than half of Aerospike’s customers already run the database in various public clouds, according to Aerospike. And some of these customers have adapted the database to take advantage of cloud-native components, such as by writing automation scripts and by integrating the database with Kubernetes operators, which lets them scale the database up and down using containers.

But there’s a certain element of technical complexity that comes with developing those underlying cloud tools and components yourself. And that’s what Aerospike says will go away when a customer chooses the new Aerospike Cloud, thanks to its support for Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) standards.

“We are using CNCF components, like Grafana, Prometheus, Helm Charts, and Kubernetes, to build a set of tools and product components, which we call Aerospike Cloud, which enables Aerospike to easily get deployed on pretty much any cloud,” says Srini Srinivasan, Aerospike’s chief product officer and founder.

The new Aerospike cloud offering will start on Google Cloud, including the Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and the Google Compute Platform (GCP). Over time, the offering will run on other cloud offerings, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Alibaba, Srinivasan says.

Aerospike customers – and database customers in general – want more standardization, not less. Standardizing on the Linux Foundation’s CNCF components goes a long way in minimizing the technological risk that some of Aerospike’s more forward-looking customers absorb when configuring the database to run in the cloud, and it also simplifies life for those tasked with managing it, Srinivasan says.

“What we have now is, you can go to the cluster, use the Kubernetes operator to say ‘Increase capacity by 10%’ or ‘Reduce capacity by 50%.’ Now the intelligence of shutting down a node, quieting the node, and removing the node, all of that is done automatically,” he tells Datanami. “All those individual base features are already available in the production. Now you don’t have to do much more than issue a single command. That’s it. And the operator will take care of the actual mechanics of either increasing the capacity or reducing the capacity, or so on.”

The company anticipates that a good chunk of customers currently running Aerospike in the cloud will want to adopt the new Aerospike Cloud offering. And the offering will be adopted by bulk of new customers who are looking to deploy a new database (which is assumed to run in the cloud as the default deployment option, per Gartner).

This is a win-win for customers, Srinivasan says.

“Many of them have essentially achieved 60% to 70% operational savings at speed and scale with Aerospike,” he says. “Now they can extend these to the cloud, without doing a lot of work.   They simply deploy these components that we are shipping as Aerospike Cloud with Aerospike Enterprise Edition, and then they simply be able to expand into the cloud.”

Standardizing on CNCF components gives customers comfort in knowing that Aerospike is supporting a widely accepted standard and isn’t developing on technology that will be obsolete or killed off in the coming months or years, says Aerospike Chief Marketing Officer Bill Odell.

“You know it’s going to be supported, and supported in a big way,” Odell says. “So you’re not worried about being locked in and you can benefit from all the wonderful things that standards do for us, which is interoperability and performance. We think that’s a huge benefit to the way we’re approaching this.”

As part of its move to adopt the CNCF components, Aerospike is deprecating its Management Console. Customers that have developed their own scripts and consoles will also be encouraged to follow Aerospike’s lead and use the new components.

“Taking a standards-based approach is where they want to go,” Odell continues. “They don’t want to have to continue with managing different types of approaches.”

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