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It's just Kafka made easy
What do you like best about the product?
Having a nice interface with really good options to better configure and setup kafka topics and so.
What do you dislike about the product?
I struggled a bit at first to reset an offset from a topic, since we had all those good options I thought there was an easier way of doing that, but yeah, you can always make use of the confluence platform to do it directly through its interface.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
High traffic messages regarding events inside our platform.
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Surviving from dataloss
What do you like best about the product?
Ability to rollback to exact second with ease
What do you dislike about the product?
I have not found anything that I dislike
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
No need for DBA, backups are taken care for you automiatcally
Great interface with knowledgeable support team.
What do you like best about the product?
The interface is intuitive. The support team is helpful although it takes a while to answer.
What do you dislike about the product?
It is not PCI-DSS compliant which is a requirement for our business. To be able to use Aiven we will move some tables that have cardholder data to an infrastructure that we have.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
To make the replicas in different cloud companies is an unnecessary complication and Aiven solves that for us.
Easy to use high quality service
What do you like best about the product?
I can upgrade the service plan of a database quickly and easily with no downtime. Also the point-in-time backup gives a lot of reassurance.
What do you dislike about the product?
Limited role and permissions management features for administrators, but nothing we couldn't work around easily and I think more granularity is in the roadmap.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Using Aiven to host a production postgres DB which handles any transactional and also any personal data for our API. The benefits are fast and easy hosting without us having to implement infrastructure or security. We can easily spin up DBs for dev and test environments.
Gets the hassle of maintaining out of the loop
What do you like best about the product?
I have managed kafka before and aiven gets the hassle out of rebalancing and stuff out of the loop
What do you dislike about the product?
There's no support for signalfx which I don't like.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
It's a bit complex :)
Modern Software and Painless Setup
What do you like best about the product?
Modern Software:
- Latest version of PostgreSQL database engine available (11.2). Our previous hosted database provider was stuck at version 9.6.
Features:
- Quick and easy database forking.
- Painless Google Cloud Platform VPC peering setup at no extra cost.
- Easy to switch back-and-forth between VPC and public network.
- Direct access to the secondary read-only replica on high availability plans. Other providers usually hide the replica and only make it available when failing over.
Management and Monitoring:
- Good web management console.
- Command-line interface client.
- Terraform infrastructure management. I haven't tested it yet, but I plan to.
- Integration with Datadog infrastructure monitoring service provider.
Security:
- TOTP two-factor authentication.
Support:
- Good email support. I asked some technical questions before I started using the service and the response was fast and detailed.
- Latest version of PostgreSQL database engine available (11.2). Our previous hosted database provider was stuck at version 9.6.
Features:
- Quick and easy database forking.
- Painless Google Cloud Platform VPC peering setup at no extra cost.
- Easy to switch back-and-forth between VPC and public network.
- Direct access to the secondary read-only replica on high availability plans. Other providers usually hide the replica and only make it available when failing over.
Management and Monitoring:
- Good web management console.
- Command-line interface client.
- Terraform infrastructure management. I haven't tested it yet, but I plan to.
- Integration with Datadog infrastructure monitoring service provider.
Security:
- TOTP two-factor authentication.
Support:
- Good email support. I asked some technical questions before I started using the service and the response was fast and detailed.
What do you dislike about the product?
Pricing and Plans:
- More expensive than AWS RDS and GCP Cloud SQL. However, smaller providers like Aiven take their database offerings more seriously instead of just seeing them as add-ons to their other cloud services.
- Storage options are too inflexible. They start with 8 GB and then immediately jump to 80 GB.
Features:
- Backup downloading is cumbersome. You must use PostgreSQL's pgdump CLI utility, and if you want to download an older snapshot, you must first restore it to a database instance using point-in-time recovery and then create a dump using pgdump. Ideally, I should be able to go to the web console, select a snapshot and click "Download".
- Backup retention time is too short. Business plans only have 14 days, while I think that 30 days should be the minimum for production-grade plans.
Security:
- The current plaintext database administrator password can be obtained from the web console. Access to the web console itself can be protected with two-factor authentication, but I still think that the best password recovery option is the generation of a new password.
- More expensive than AWS RDS and GCP Cloud SQL. However, smaller providers like Aiven take their database offerings more seriously instead of just seeing them as add-ons to their other cloud services.
- Storage options are too inflexible. They start with 8 GB and then immediately jump to 80 GB.
Features:
- Backup downloading is cumbersome. You must use PostgreSQL's pgdump CLI utility, and if you want to download an older snapshot, you must first restore it to a database instance using point-in-time recovery and then create a dump using pgdump. Ideally, I should be able to go to the web console, select a snapshot and click "Download".
- Backup retention time is too short. Business plans only have 14 days, while I think that 30 days should be the minimum for production-grade plans.
Security:
- The current plaintext database administrator password can be obtained from the web console. Access to the web console itself can be protected with two-factor authentication, but I still think that the best password recovery option is the generation of a new password.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We have multiple backend services running on GCP that use PostgreSQL for data storage.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
It may be a bit expensive, but if you want a managed database provider that sees PostgreSQL as a core product and not an add-on, go with Aiven.
Very Good Support
What do you like best about the product?
The support of Aiven helped us several times, solving a lot of our doubts and issues. They always respond very fast.
What do you dislike about the product?
We didn't experience any problem yet. Everything is just working.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Replication of a Postgres DB in a big data analytics platform using Kafka as a service on Aiven.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
If you appreciate a good support and easy of use, Aiven will be a very good service for you.
Easy way to use Kafka without dealing without the need to stand it up yourself
What do you like best about the product?
- Dealing with the complexity of installing and running the Kafka is taken away from you.
- It had sensible configuration out-of-the-box so I didn't have to deal with the myriad of Kafka settings.
- Support for log compacted topics.
- Integration with other third party services.
- I also liked having a 30-day trial period.
- It had sensible configuration out-of-the-box so I didn't have to deal with the myriad of Kafka settings.
- Support for log compacted topics.
- Integration with other third party services.
- I also liked having a 30-day trial period.
What do you dislike about the product?
- The server certificate is not signed by a public CA, so additional configuration is needed for clients to add a truststore. My guess is that each server cert is dynamically generated for each new user doing the trial, so this is a minor issue. But I wonder if a wildcard cert signed by a public CA would still give the security you want, and give the convenience of not worrying about a truststore.
- Aiven requires clients use a client certificate. This is reasonable, but adds friction for trial users who need to deal with creating a keystore for any clients they want to use. If there were documentation that showed the explicit steps to create the keystore (and trustore, from the previous point), that would be very helpful. You could go even further and pre-create the keystore and trustore, along with instructions for how to configure clients to use them, such as a Java client, of the Kafka Tool GUI (http://www.kafkatool.com/).
- Aiven requires clients use a client certificate. This is reasonable, but adds friction for trial users who need to deal with creating a keystore for any clients they want to use. If there were documentation that showed the explicit steps to create the keystore (and trustore, from the previous point), that would be very helpful. You could go even further and pre-create the keystore and trustore, along with instructions for how to configure clients to use them, such as a Java client, of the Kafka Tool GUI (http://www.kafkatool.com/).
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
I work at Kaazing and we are exploring a partnership with Aiven. We have a hosted platform that streams data from Kafka brokers to browser and mobile apps. We are looking at how easy it is stream from hosted Kafka solutions like Aiven, rather than prospects having to install and run their own Kafka broker clusters.
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