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Aiven for Valkey includes the Valkey Search module setup and ready to go. Here's what that looks like in practice: a small online shop adding real search on top of the cache it's already running. Needle & Yarn sells the yarn you crochet with (skeins) and the design patterns you crochet from. Like a lot of e-commerce backends, it already runs Valkey as a product cache, with each product stored as a Hash for hot-path performance.

In this article we’ll show how we built an image search demo in Aiven Apps. The demo uses the CLIP Large Multimodal Model (LMM) to turn a user’s text prompts into a vector that can be compared with the precomputed vectors for a corpus of images, allowing the user to find images based on their text. While in this example the LMM input (the text prompt) is coming from the user, the principle is the same as for an internally generated query.

Every time your app asks the database 'does this row exist,' it pays the cost of a database query to get back 'no'.

OpenSearch isn't just a search engine anymore. Recent releases moved it into AI infrastructure: agentic memory built in, Better Binary Quantization (BBQ) compressing vectors 32x, token-usage tracking, and a one-command Observability Stack. A stack for building practical AI applications, not just indexing. The catch is that production-sized OpenSearch clusters aren't where you want to prototype.

We recently announced the Limited Availability (LA) launch of Aiven Apps, which lets teams define, run, and scale production-ready, real-time applications using container and Compose-based workflows they already know. It provides a managed, stateless runtime that runs directly inside your data perimeter, letting you deploy applications alongside open-source data services like PostgreSQL and Apache Kafka.

Many businesses see emissions reduction as a cost sink: assigning people, maintaining compliance, the hard labor of calculating carbon signatures. That view is out of date – and a new partnership between Aiven and data provider OxygenIT demonstrates why. Our premise: your carbon footprint isn't just about understanding emissions; it's about understanding your business. Today, we're announcing a new service that helps with both.

In the high-stakes world of Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) like Expedia, Hopper, Priceline, and Airbnb, seconds matter. A traveler searching for a "beachfront stay in Hawaii" isn't just looking for a room — they are reacting to weather changes, fluctuating flight prices, and social media trends. Traditional travel platforms often rely on stale data: yesterday's search history or last week's preferences. To truly compete, travel platforms must pivot to Real-Time Context Engineering.

Luckily, in Kafka cache invalidation is not an issue, but we still need to name things. Let me tell you a story about naming things in Kafka.

Half a year ago, we launched a free tier cloud Kafka. We have 16,808 clusters so we got curious: what are these builders telling us about the state of Apache Kafka? The headlines this quarter suggest Kafka is dying because the streaming market is consolidating. At Aiven we see the opposite. Kafka is not shrinking. It is spreading outward from enterprise platform teams into the hands of individual builders. We are now seeing >200 new Kafka clusters created per day on the free tier.

When we launched the Free Tier, we made a promise: graduating to a paid tier shouldn’t feel like switching platforms. It should simply feel like tapping “Continue watching in HD”. The Developer Tier for Aiven for Apache Kafka is that upgrade. $35 a month for the serious, ongoing workloads that haven’t yet reached enterprise scale. Everything we said was coming is now live.