Request-response is the traditional communication pattern used in computing and in most web applications. In web services, the standard approach is for a client to make a synchronous HTTP request, and then wait for a response from the web server. In a microservices architecture, request-response is also commonly used: a web server sends a connection request or query to a database, then waits for a response. For many use cases, this pattern — a chain of synchronous requests and responses — works well. Until it doesn’t.

What happens when one link in the chain goes down? Requests that are waiting…

Aiven recently hosted a webinar where we spoke with two experts about the ways retail companies can utilize cloud technology to stay competitive in 2021 and beyond.

As Senior VP at Emarsys, Alex Timlin is an Entrepreneurial Executive specialising in Go-To-Market, Product Marketing and Product Leadership with 15+ years’ experience building and managing high performing teams in multiple geographies and across multiple industries for fast-growing SaaS businesses.

As Zalando’s Director of Engineering, Jan Hegewald is responsible for the strategy, product management, and the engineering of Zalando’s central product platform that processes up to 50,000 offer updates per second. …

Tired of being cooped up in your home office, or your actual office, or both if that’s how you roll? Let’s take a break and go surfing on the waves of data…

When you monitor your systems 24/7/365, sometimes you find your graphs doing something… interesting.

For example, this is cool, although at the same time pretty normal: heavy load on a server.

Logs are extremely important for understanding the health of your application, and in the event of problems, they help in diagnosing the issue. Methods and tools for capturing, aggregating and searching logs make the diagnosis process simpler. They are even more important with the adoption of microservices and container orchestrators, like Kubernetes, because logs come from many more places and in more formats. Aiven’s solutions architect Aaron Khan takes a closer look.

With hundreds or even thousands of Pods creating logs on dozens of Nodes, it’s tedious, if not impossible, to install a log capturing agent on each Pod for…

I was sitting in my office, sipping bourbon and cleaning my trusty keyboard, when the phone rang. It was a customer, a recent one, and they had a problem.

The customer’s read rates were fluctuating oddly. They were expecting a quick turnaround on the job since, they said, the culprit was obvious: it was Redis, unable to handle their loads. They were testing a premium plan with Aiven for Redis, and now I was getting an earful about how their expectations weren’t being met. …

When you’ve been with a cloud provider and paid their bills for years, the bond can be strong. Even if you’re not happy in the relationship, you can feel trapped by bonuses or by regulatory restrictions. But at Aiven, we don’t think you ought to have to marry your data cloud.

Companies operating in regulated industries like health or finance are used to getting the short end of the stick where it comes to managed services. …

PostgreSQL and MySQL are both widely used open source database management systems (DBMS) that also support some noSQL features. Coincidentally, or not, both are available through Aiven.

When you’re looking for a reliable managed database solution, which one should you pick?

How are managed PostgreSQL and MySQL different?

PostgreSQL and MySQL are very similar in the uses they are put to — well, they’re relational databases, you can’t really use MySQL as a coat rack ( although it can make toast). That said, we can dig out some differences.

Applications

One big limitation on your freedom of choice is applications that expect to find a particular database. Flask…