Aerospike is releasing Aerospike Database 6.3, delivering operational, quality, performance, and stability improvements.
Aerospike Database 6.3 adds support for OpenSSL 3, which means that it runs well on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 (RHEL) and its many clones, as well as Ubuntu 22.04. The release continues to support RHEL and Debian-compatible Linux distributions that come with OpenSSL 1. One caveat is that support for Debian 10 on ARM64 hardware has been discontinued, however, server 6.3 still runs on Debian 10 on x86_64.
Ubuntu 18.04 was removed from the list of supported Linux distributions, starting with server 6.3.
Aerospike automatically responds under heavy load, according to its data retention configuration parameters. Server 6.3 adds two dynamically configurable parameters to help protect cluster nodes from running out of memory or storage when data is added at a rate that risks exceeding node capacity.
The new compression-acceleration configuration parameter trades off CPU consumption and compression ratio (storage) in systems with LZ4 storage compression.
Many users deploy Aerospike as a multi-tenant data service, with distinct internal and external customers separated by namespace (comparable to an RDBMS database) and sets (comparable to RDBMS tables). Multitenancy leans on Aerospike enterprise features such as scoped role-based access control (RBAC) permissions, and rate quotas on operations.
Site reliability engineers (SREs) can now limit the storage used by an Aerospike set to a specified number of bytes with the set-level stop-writes-size configuration parameter. For data-in-memory namespaces, this limits memory_data_bytes. Otherwise, this is a limit for device_data_bytes. Read more about capping the size of a set.
Satisfying a long-standing feature request, this update adds a syslog log sink so that log messages can be streamed to syslog-compatible Unix domain sockets, such as logstash. This allows log messages to be easily sent off-node to centralized logging facilities that serve the entire cluster. In container-based deployments, such as Kubernetes, the new log sink simplifies access to the server logs of these relatively isolated cluster nodes.
Until server 6.3, the only type of log messages that could be sent to syslog were the ones in the audit trail logging context.
Some improvements go beyond All Flash; they help with any deployment of Aerospike. However, they tend to have a larger impact when the primary index is stored on a Flash device.
Server 6.3 also avoids duplicate resolution of records that have already been resolved during the relevant period.
Each truncate command now uses separate threads. The namespace context parameter truncate-threads controls the number of threads used by a new truncate job. Users that truncate many sets concurrently should consider tuning this config.
Starting with server 6.3, truncate jobs also leverage set indexes, significantly speeding them up. However, if the set contains any tombstones at the beginning of the job, the set index cannot be utilized for truncate.
The namespace stat truncated_records has been removed, and new namespace and per-set truncating boolean stats have been added, to indicate whether a namespace or set is in the process of being truncated.
Server 6.3 adds support for Vault Enterprise namespaces through the new vault-namespace configuration parameter, and was tested against HashiCorp Cloud Platform (HCP) Vault.
Before Aerospike Database version 6.3, when a Vault token expired, the only way to apply a new Vault token was to restart the node. To simplify operations, the Vault token file can be modified with a new Vault token, after which dynamically setting the vault-token-file configuration parameter to the same path will instruct Aerospike to reload a new Vault token from the file.
Document-oriented modeling gets a couple of new developer API features. One is the ability to compare a map argument to a map bin using Expressions. A developer can create a Filter Expression to query for all the records where a bin contains a specific map.
Server 6.3 also begins to address a potential performance degradation noticed by users of short queries (queries that consistently return a small number of records) using an equality index filter. The inline-short-queries configuration parameter runs short queries directly in the service threads to buy back much of the lost performance. A complete solution is scheduled for server version 6.4.
For more information about these updates, visit www.aerospike.com.