In 2016, Aerospike initiated its partnership with Pivotal.io, a software and services company based in San Francisco, California. Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF), Pivotal’s comprehensive cloud-native platform as a service (PaaS), allows enterprises to run in any cloud, in container environments, or on dedicated bare metal servers. This modern IT platform allows Pivotal to accelerate software development and enable systems of engagement (SoEs)—a new class of real-time, context-driven applications—within enterprises that are tackling new use cases. Thus, Pivotal’s core mission parallels that of Aerospike, a key-value, highly performant and scalable NoSQL solution whose unique cacheless, hybrid memory architecture makes it the database of choice for SOEs in enterprises across a variety of industries.
Both Aerospike and Pivotal are used by enterprises to facilitate software deployment and decrease time to market, thus increasing their competitive advantage. Pivotal was built to help businesses speed up and improve the way they build software through the use of Agile development techniques. Its new approach to software yields radical improvement in operational efficiency and developer productivity as well as reduced operating costs, allowing its users to deliver better products faster than ever. Similarly, Aerospike was built to make database scaling and operations fast and easy for all developers. Aerospike provides important benefits for users—predictable high performance, high availability and uptime, superior scalability, and low total cost of ownership (TCO)—which also support Pivotal’s core value of agility. Not surprisingly, the two companies target the same user base.
Last October, with the beta release of the Aerospike Service Broker offering, aka “tile”, on the Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) ecosystem, Aerospike became available as part of PCF’s Partner Services portfolio; this tile is now generally available. Since then, Aerospike has expanded its deployment offerings for enterprises by adding two more tiles on PCF: Aerospike Enterprise Edition (EE) Managed Service for PCF and Aerospike EE OnDemand Service for PCF. Not only do these three tiles provide versatility for developers, allowing them to boost high-performance, enterprise-grade applications, but they give Aerospike the distinction of being the first—and currently only—NoSQL database to have multiple offerings on the PCF ecosystem.
The integration of Aerospike and PCF enables the fast and easy deployment of Aerospike on the Pivotal platform, providing PCF users access to the predictable performance and proven high availability of Aerospike. With PCF’s focus on new use cases and expanded use of data for richer applications, Aerospike is the best database for many PCF deployments. Here is a brief overview of the three tiles:
The Aerospike Service Broker tile for PCF integrates a user’s Aerospike database with that user’s PCF deployment by automatically discovering the namespaces that have been created on the database and exposing them as service plans in the Pivotal Marketplace.
The Aerospike EE Managed Service tile for PCF allows a user to configure, deploy and manage a single Aerospike Enterprise Edition NoSQL database cluster in the PCF deployment.
The Aerospike EE OnDemand Service tile for PCF allows a user to configure, deploy and manage any number of Aerospike Enterprise Edition NoSQL database instances in the PCF deployment.
We will now review each of the three Aerospike tiles for Pivotal Cloud Foundry and describe typical use cases.
Aerospike Service Broker for PCF
The Aerospike Service Broker tile for PCF integrates your existing Aerospike database with your PCF deployment. It does this by automatically discovering the namespaces that have been created on the database and exposing them as service plans in the Pivotal Marketplace. Once you’ve installed and configured the tile, you can create instances of these service plans and bind them to applications to provide connection information to the applications.
This tile provides an easy way to bind PCF applications to an existing Aerospike database cluster. Typical use cases for this tile are those requiring high performance and very low latency, such as high-frequency trading and real-time bidding. In these use cases, Aerospike is deployed on a bare metal infrastructure vs. a virtualized environment.
Aerospike EE Managed Service for PCF
The Aerospike EE Managed Service tile for PCF enables you to deploy an Enterprise Edition NoSQL Aerospike database to your PCF deployment. You can configure the namespaces on the database and expose them as service plans in the Pivotal Marketplace. You can also create instances of these service plans and bind them to applications in order to provide connection information to the applications.
This tile makes it easy to deploy and manage an Aerospike cluster within PCF that can then be shared between many applications in PCF. It’s best suited for apps that do not need multi-cluster and isolation, and for which virtual infrastructure-induced latencies are acceptable. A typical use case for the tile is a single Aerospike Enterprise Edition NoSQL database that is shared among several applications—for example, a shared session store.
Aerospike EE OnDemand Service for PCF
The Aerospike EE OnDemand Service tile for PCF allows you to configure and deploy multiple Aerospike Enterprise Edition NoSQL database clusters to your PCF deployment.
These clusters can be configured and scaled independently, as required by your application. The tile allows you to configure the default settings for small, medium, and large cluster plans. You can create instances of these service plans using the Cloud Foundry Command Line Interface (cf CLI) and bind them to applications to access the Aerospike database managed by this service. Once created, you can modify Aerospike clusters using the cf CLI. This allows you to dynamically scale the services as needed.
Using this tile, you can deploy and manage any number of Aerospike Enterprise Edition NoSQL database clusters within your PCF environment. Accordingly, the tile is suitable for a wide range of use cases. It’s best suited for apps that need multi-cluster setup and isolation (e.g., isolating different applications onto their own Aerospike database cluster to avoid noisy neighbor problems), and for which virtual infrastructure-induced latencies are acceptable.
An illustration of the three tiles is provided below.
Figure 1. The Three Aerospike Tiles for Pivotal Cloud Foundry
The Aerospike Service Broker tile for PCF, the Aerospike EE Managed Service tile for PCF and the Aerospike EE OnDemand Service tile for PCF are all currently available on Pivotal.io. We encourage you to use all three for your own applications and look forward to hearing about what you build with Aerospike and Pivotal on our user forum!
Also be sure to check out Spring Data for Aerospike, an open source community project hosted under the Spring umbrella and sponsored by Aerospike. It provides a data integration layer for Aerospike that is familiar to Spring developers.
