Aerospike Cloud: Accelerating time-to-value with a fully managed database
Introduction
The market consistently challenges businesses to deliver always-on services and products; they have to innovate and adapt faster and faster, continuously increasing pressure on their development and IT operations teams to provide new data-intensive applications.
When companies require new technologies, like Aerospike, to create differentiation or satisfy a need, their technical teams are challenged to master, provision, secure, scale, and maintain a new stack. Every simple change introduces risk and friction into the business.
Aerospike Cloud mitigates risk and accelerates time-to-value.
In the first section, we will answer the most common questions that companies ask Aerospike:
What are the benefits of a managed database?
Why do you offer the service?
How does it compare to self-managed Aerospike?
What is the support experience?
What is the process for being fully operational in Aerospike Cloud?
How do you reduce risk and improve my time to deployment?
In the second half, we explore the technology behind Aerospike Cloud. We review the Aerospike Cloud console, a web application that customers can use to visualize their clusters’ business and technical aspects.
The summary will help you answer the biggest question: what should you expect of a managed database that provides real-time capabilities, all the time, anywhere for your company's future?
Aerospike Cloud
Digital applications have become woven into our daily lives and routines to the point where we depend on the information they provide and their ability to meet our needs, whether it is checking the weather, ordering furniture, or just interacting with friends and family. Becoming increasingly reliant on these applications, we’ve also come to expect instant feedback and constant uptime. For businesses, this translates to an always-on approach to delivering their applications and services.
The demands of the always-on, real-time pace of business force companies to quickly develop new data-intensive applications to maintain a competitive advantage. And the pressure to deliver optimized infrastructure is forcing IT operations and resources to the breaking point.
One key to success in today’s cloud business world is optimizing resources to empower businesses to act consistently across billions of transactions in real time while minimizing the impact of infrastructure costs.
Aerospike Cloud enables enterprises to deliver new digital value to customers rather than managing databases and infrastructure. With Aerospike Cloud, Aerospike takes responsibility for providing and maintaining a tailored deployment of the industry’s most resilient, low latency, high-scale real-time data platform with enterprise-grade security and observability.
Why Aerospike Cloud?
Our main objective with Aerospike Cloud is to offer end-to-end deployment and management of highly available Aerospike Database clusters using security best practices in enterprise-class environments. As your business expands, so does your data, and naturally, your database needs to scale up quickly to support your business requirements.
We have seen a few different challenges that businesses tend to face when bringing their applications to market:
Scaling without impacting performance: many enterprises cannot scale distributed databases.
Reducing friction and complexity: rapid expansion in the cloud can introduce high risks and even higher costs.
Managing multiple cloud environments: enterprise applications often need a multi-stage cloud strategy that includes development, testing, production, and disaster recovery.
Our comprehensive experience and expertise with the Aerospike Real-time Data Platform enable us to offer Aerospike Cloud.
Benefits
Aerospike Cloud begins with the Aerospike Real-time Data Platform. Offering always accurate, globally distributed, strongly consistent data, it can scale from terabytes to petabytes with consistent, sub-millisecond speeds. With this data platform as our foundation, we can provide:
Faster time-to-value The service is built on years of experience architecting and managing the Aerospike real-time data platform both on-premises and in the cloud.
Increased organizational agility Your time is better spent aligning your organizational resources with your goals rather than using valuable resources to design and maintain your Aerospike deployment.
Security Our enterprise-class features include Data Encryption (in motion and at rest), Authentication, Authorization, Auditing, and more to provide security and operational controls to comply with your audit needs.
The Aerospike Cloud Difference
To meet the always-on requirements of a real-time business with zero impact on your performance, you need an enterprise-grade system. We ensure that Aerospike Cloud is enterprise-ready through six main attributes:
High availability
The service is designed for 100% availability. This means any maintenance upgrades or troubleshooting are done with zero downtime for the environment and no impact on the availability of your cross-cluster. With an availability SLA of 99.99%, Aerospike Cloud ensures your Aerospike database clusters are fully operational at all times.
Security
We understand that data security is vital to your operations. Aerospike ensures your data is always protected with encryption at rest, encrypting not only the database but also the drives themselves. Additionally, all data in transit is secured using Transport Layer Security (TLS).
Data isolation
The Aerospike database cluster is deployed in a dedicated Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) environment. All communication to the VPC is secured through a peering mechanism—on Amazon Web Services (AWS), we use VPC Peering; on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), we use VPC Network Peering.
Reliability and support
Aerospike Cloud ensures your database operates seamlessly for mission-critical applications with 24x7 global service and support. Our team combines deep expertise in the Aerospike database with extensive experience managing highly available cloud systems to deliver unparalleled reliability and performance.
We handle all aspects of infrastructure and platform maintenance, including replacing instances, applying OS patches, implementing security updates, and performing database upgrades—all with zero downtime. This comprehensive approach ensures your workloads stay secure, up-to-date, and operational at all times.
Cloud flexibility
Aerospike Cloud also allows you to run your workloads on AWS and GCP across any region without being locked into any single cloud platform. You can run your application on one cloud or on multiple clouds to support your business requirements. We designed the Aerospike Real-time Data Platform and Aerospike Cloud to be platform-agnostic, with all database and service features available anywhere.
Compliance
Aerospike demonstrates its commitment to these principles, processes, and technology through its ISO27001 Certification. Similarly, Aerospike’s service team has implemented systems and controls and provided the necessary reports to demonstrate compliance with data management for a SOC 2 certification.
Accelerating time to deployment
Aerospike architecture
At the heart of our consistent cluster performance is our pattern for the cluster architecture.
We deploy the cluster across three availability zones, which ensures we are fault-tolerant and can align to the zones used by your application. This configuration is part of our always-on architecture and allows us to scale both vertically and horizontally. We also deploy a small number of admin nodes in each zone. These admin nodes handle our logging, monitoring, and automation to upgrade the cluster without any downtime.
Features
Aerospike Cloud also offers several features and capabilities to help you mitigate risk and accelerate your deployment:
Security by design
Aerospike Cloud ensures your data is safe through zero-trust network security and role-chaining cloud identity and access management. Additionally, we provide database authentication, user management, and encryption for data in transit and at rest.
Always-on architecture
Designed for 100% availability, we help to ensure predictable performance and data durability throughout your multi-zone cluster architecture while reducing infrastructure requirements. We implement automated backup and restore procedures to prevent any impact on your expected performance.
Observability
The Aerospike Cloud console provides aggregate metrics so you can view high-level health, configuration, and performance. Full metrics from the Aerospike monitoring stack can be configured to be sent to your observability stack by consuming metrics from the Prometheus endpoint.
Enterprise-ready deployment
Aerospike Cloud delivers real enterprise-grade deployments at any scale with end-to-end data encryption, data compression, strong consistency, high availability, and both synchronous and asynchronous data replication.
Customers running on Aerospike Cloud
Dream11
Dream11 is a fantasy sports entertainment service that serves millions of users with fantasy options for leagues spanning dozens of sporting events. Unfortunately, their database architecture, built around Redis and a relational database, failed during their Premier League matches in 2020. This failure cost them millions of dollars in lost revenue and, more importantly, the trust of their users. As a result, they decided to rebuild their service using Aerospike Cloud as the cornerstone data platform.
Why did Dream11 select Aerospike to rebuild its application and the trust of its users?
Aerospike Cloud provided the highest availability and performance and came with the stability commitment Dream11 demanded.
Working with Aerospike, Dream11 launched their service at scale in 14 days.
Through IPL (India Premier League), which serves millions of users each day, Aerospike Cloud provides 100% of the player rosters with 100% data consistency.
The site would receive large traffic spikes as the rosters were released, with millions of transactions per second (TPS) recorded each day. However, during those spikes, the latency for the 99.9th percentile for linearized reads was less than 16 milliseconds.
As their CIO stated, Aerospike Cloud was key to helping Dream11 restore users' trust in its service.
Read the full Dream11 customer story
Experian
Aerospike Cloud manages a set of global clusters that power Experian’s Fraud and Risk product line. Experian uses a regional deployment model to ensure the data stays in the appropriate region and adheres to local data privacy and consumer protection regulations. Each region has a complete set of integration, pre-production, and production clusters managed by Aerospike Cloud.
Why did Experian select Aerospike as the foundation for its Fraud and Risk products?
The operational security and controls required for managing sensitive data are paramount in the financial industry, and Aerospike Cloud met all Experian's governance requirements.
Aerospike demonstrated commitment to governance and security with the certifications for ISO27001 and SOC2.
Aerospike Cloud delivers consistent latency under 8 milliseconds for the 99.9th percentile of Experian’s transactions.
These points have improved the customer experience and allowed the experience to land new customers to use their CrossCore fraud platform.
Conclusion
Aerospike Cloud enables you to deliver always-on services and products through a fully managed cloud database that reduces the friction and complexity of running a highly sophisticated data platform. Aerospike Cloud becomes part of your team through the application development lifecycle, from prototyping and testing to integration, production, and disaster recovery, to deliver an appropriate SLA in each phase.
Customers like Dream11 and Experian trust the Aerospike Real-time Data Platform for low-latency, high-scale applications. They are building their futures on enterprise-grade security and observability features to minimize risk and accelerate time-to-value.
Get started with Aerospike
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FAQs
Find answers to common questions below to help you learn more and get the most out of Aerospike.
A cloud database is a system designed to store and manage data within a cloud environment. Cloud databases offer flexibility and scalability, allowing businesses to handle dynamic data requirements efficiently. These systems often support rapid setup, making them ideal for enterprises with evolving needs that don’t want to manage their own data centers and database infrastructure.
Cloud database management refers to the processes and tools used to create, maintain, and secure databases in a cloud environment. By combining traditional database functionality with the scalability and operational efficiency of cloud computing, organizations can reduce the burden of infrastructure maintenance while maintaining robust database functionality.
Traditional databases often rely on dedicated on-premises infrastructure, such as physical servers, which require specialized IT resources for setup, maintenance, and upgrades. This can result in high initial costs and ongoing operational demands. In contrast, cloud-based database management systems operate in virtual environments, offering businesses the scalability and flexibility to focus on application development while benefiting from pay-as-you-go pricing models.
Cloud database management systems are diverse, catering to a wide range of data storage and access needs:
- Relational databases handle structured data using predefined schemas.
- NoSQL databases offer flexibility and scalability, making them suitable for unstructured or semi-structured data.
- Time-series databases specialize in handling time-stamped information like logs or IoT data.
- Graph databases are optimized for relationships between data points, commonly used in social networks or fraud detection.
- Vector databases support advanced use cases like semantic search and AI-driven applications.
Many modern databases are multi-model, supporting a combination of these capabilities to address diverse requirements. Additionally, some systems use in-memory techniques or optimized SSD configurations to deliver high-speed data access.
Cloud database management systems rely on essential components to ensure reliability and security. Features like encryption and firewalls safeguard data integrity, while access controls and secure transmission methods prevent unauthorized access. Validation processes ensure data accuracy and authenticity, and robust backup and recovery strategies protect against data loss or service interruptions.
Cloud database management systems offer scalability, allowing businesses to adjust resources as data needs evolve. They also provide flexibility for managing applications in multi-cloud or hybrid environments. Cost efficiency can be significant with pay-as-you-go pricing, though some workloads may find on-prem solutions more economical. Additional benefits include automated failovers, backups, and performance monitoring tools that enhance reliability and database efficiency.
While cloud database management systems offer many advantages, challenges include limited customization options with standardized platforms and the potential for vendor lock-in, making migrations complex. Businesses should also consider how service outages might temporarily disrupt operations, despite robust failover mechanisms.
Key features include scalability to handle growing data demands, multi-tenancy support for secure data isolation, and automation to simplify routine tasks like backups and updates. Strong performance monitoring tools optimize efficiency, while robust security measures, including encryption and authentication, protect sensitive data both at rest and in transit. Organizations should also consider the range of managed service options available, from basic monitoring to fully managed solutions.
To select the most suitable cloud database solution, businesses should assess their specific needs, including scalability, integration capabilities, cost structure, and security requirements. Choosing a solution that aligns with existing workflows and data handling requirements ensures a smooth transition and long-term success.