Instaclustr Product Update: September 2023

There have been a lot of exciting things happening at Instaclustr–here’s a roundup of the updates to our platform over the last few months. 

As always, if you have a specific feature request or improvement you’d love to see, please get in contact with us. 

Major Announcements: 

Instaclustr Managed Platform 

• PCI Offerings Available on Google Cloud: 

We are excited to announce that all Instaclustr’s PCI offerings are now available on Google Cloud Platform. For full details of our PCI offering, please see our support page. 

• Instaclustr’s Offer on Google Cloud Provider (GCP) Marketplace:  

All our offerings are now available as SaaS subscriptions via the GCP marketplace. This is true for our RIIA (Run In Instaclustr Account) model with  support for RIYOA (Run In Your Own Account) model to come soon. 

• Instaclustr Achieves ISO 27001 and ISO 27018 Certifications:                        

We are pleased to announce that Instaclustr has achieved ISO 27001 and ISO 27018. Together these provide additional assurance to customers and partners on the extensive controls and processes we’ve implemented regarding data protection. Our Security and Trust page has more information. 

Cadence® 

• Cadence® 1.0 Released on the Instaclustr Managed Platform:                   

We’re excited to announce the General Availability of Cadence® 1.0. This is largely an incremental release, focused on edge-case stability improvements and monitoring enhancements. 

• Multi-Region Cadence® Workflow :  

Cadence multi-region, now generally available, supports replicating workflow states across 2 Cadence clusters and provides failover in the event of a full region failure. Additionally, it can also be used for zero downtime migration from one Cadence cluster to another. 

• AWS PrivateLink for Cadence® : 

With the General Available release of AWS PrivateLink for Cadence,  customers can benefit from a simpler alternative to using VPC peering and transit gateways. More information is available here. 

PostgreSQL® 

• PostgreSQL® on ANF Storage: 

The release of Instaclustr for PostgreSQL® on Azure NetApp Files gives  customers the benefit of blazingly fast IOPS of ANF storage, resulting in a remarkable upgrade in achievable transactions per second (TPS), allowing them to achieve the highest possible levels of PostgreSQL performance. Try PostgreSQL-ANF on our console today, or contact us for more information. 

Ocean for Apache Spark  

• Azure support:  

We announced General Availability of the Ocean for Spark product on  Microsoft Azure. Customers can now choose to have optimization of their AI and data engineering at scale on Azure, GCP, or AWS.  

Other Significant Changes: 

Apache Cassandra® 

• The Public Preview release of the Debezium® Change Data Capture Connector for Managed Apache Cassandra®. 
• Public Preview support for AWS PrivateLink with Managed Apache Cassandra. 
• Support for Apache Cassandra® versions 3.11.15, 4.0.11, and 4.1.3 is now generally available on the Instaclustr Platform.   
• New AWS and GCP nodes optimized for Managed Apache Cassandra are available on the Instaclustr Platform. 
• Retirement of the Apache Spark add-on for Managed Apache Cassandra® from May 31, 2023. Going forward, Ocean for Apache Spark on Spot by NetApp is NetApp’s recommended offering for Apache Spark usage. 

Apache Kafka® 

• Apache Kafka® and Kafka® Connect 3.3.1, Apache Kafka® and Kafka® Connect 3.4.1  are now generally available when used in ZooKeeper mode, and in Public Preview when used in KRaft mode. 
• Karapace Rest Proxy and Schema Registry 3.6.2 are now generally available. 
• Additional Node Types for our Managed Kafka, Kafka Connect, and dedicated ZooKeeper for clusters running on AWS and GCP are now supported. 
• mTLS Client Authentication for Apache Kafka® is now generally available. 

Cadence® 

• Development Shared Infrastructure for managed Cadence is now generally available. 
• AWS PrivateLink for Cadence® released in GA. More information is available here. 

Instaclustr Managed Platform 

• Added support for AWS Multi Region KMS Keys in RIIA and RIYOA provisioning. 
• New accounts to search functionality allowing customers to search across multiple accounts. 
• Application Logs for all bundles are now viewable through the Instaclustr Console. 
• Added cluster lifecycle details to the cluster details page in the console. 
• Added support for the new regions: Asia-Southeast2 (Jakarta), Central Europe (Warsaw), Western Europe (Paris), Western Europe (Milan), Southwestern Europe (Madrid) for GCP region, and Switzerland North region for Azure. 

OpenSearch®

• OpenSearch 1.3.11 and OpenSearch 2.7.0  are now generally available. 
• OpenSearch Feature Updates support enhanced Connection Experience, AWS PrivateLink, and multiple additional plugins. 

PostgreSQL® 

• PostgreSQL versions 13.10, 13.11, 14.7, 14.8, 15.2, and 15.3 are now generally available. 

Redis 

• AWS PrivateLink on Instaclustr for Redis is now generally available. 
• Redis versions 6.2.12 and 7.0.11 are now generally available. 

Ocean for Apache Spark  

• Out of Memory (OOM) mitigation: We added automation that detects OOM conditions in our customers’ applications. Our autotuning then remediates OOM— performance is improved by optimally scaling up memory. 
• Dynamic Kubernetes PVC reuse: By incorporating the open source community’s fix for PVC reuse in Apache Spark 3.4, we help our customers avoid data loss upon cloud spot instance interruption. 
• Spark SQL direct: Using the Spark Connect of Apache Spark 3.4, we added the ability for your SQL tools to directly query Ocean for Apache Spark Customers who already have a trove of legacy business queries can benefit by avoiding the tedium of having to wrap those queries in application code. 
• AWS PrivateLink option—between our control plane and the customer’s data plane. Customers benefit by restricting inbound traffic to their cloud. 

Upcoming Releases:

Apache Cassandra®

• Continuing on from the Public Preview release of AWS PrivateLink for Managed Cassandra, we’re now working on making it generally available within the coming months. 
• Similarly, development of our Debezium® Change Data Capture addon for Managed Cassandra continues and will soon be released to general availability. 
• Customer Initiated Resize—Vertical Scaling that is available to Managed Cassandra customers on the AWS cloud provider, will be extended soon to our Managed Cassandra customers on GCP and Azure AZ cloud providers. 

Apache Kafka®

• Kafka FSxN support is to be introduced soon as Public Preview, followed soon thereafter by GA. Initially, support for tiered storage using NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP will be provided, while later we’ll be exposing other innate features of FSxN, such as Backup and Forking. 

Cadence® 

• Our Managed Candence​ offering will soon be PCI certified for AWS, Instaclustr Managed Platform 
• Customer Maintenance Event Notification Configuration is under development​ to provide flexibility for customers in consuming notifications for maintenance events​. The feature will support configuring the frequency type of events and the channel being used for customers to receive such notifications. 

OpenSearch® 

• OpenSearch 2.9.0 is expected to be generally available soon. 
• Release of Dedicated Ingest Nodes feature is coming shortly as Public Preview. This will allow you to dedicate an “ingest” node role to certain nodes, taking the load off your data nodes and increasing the performance and stability of the cluster.  
• Release of searchable snapshots​​ feature is coming soon as Public Preview. This feature will make it possible to search indexes that are stored as snapshots within remote repositories (i.e., S3) without the need to download all the index data to disk ahead of time, allowing you to save time and leverage cheaper storage options. 

PostgreSQL® 

• Release of PostgreSQL ANF Snapshot​ features will be available soon. This feature will provide ultra-fast snapshots with no interruption to the customer’s PostgreSQL workload.  

Redis 

• Single Redis node provisioning is to be added to our Console, API, and Terraform. This will offer customers a lower cost entry-level option for provisioning Redis, by allowing the provisioning of a single node cluster. 

Ocean for Apache Spark 

• Chart of peak memory metrics. Memory autotune down for cost savings. 
• Embedded Jupyter Notebooks—interactive data engineering at scale. 

Did you know? 

• Lifecycle Policies on the Managed Platform Instaclustr :  

This recently released feature provides visibility into the support status of all our  offerings, their versions and nodes available on our platform. To make it even easier to get access to this information, we’ve just published Lifecycle Status of Application Versions page listing the lifecycle states for all our offerings and add-ons, along with information about future lifecycle state transitions and dates. 

• Instacollector for Redis:  

This Instaclustr started open source project provides a collection of scripts that  anyone can contribute, download, and use on their Redis or Managed Cassandra  cluster for collecting diagnostic information. Checkout our Instacollector for Redis project in Github—we welcome any contributions. 

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