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After reviewing all the submissions, we realised we could not have chosen just one winner. When we launched Aiven's Free Tier Kafka competition with a $5,000 prize pool, we wanted to see what the community could build. What we got back was incredible: genuine creativity, technical depth, and projects that are truly inspiring to the Apache Kafka community. After reviewing all the submissions, we realized we could not have chosen just one winner.

We are thrilled to announce that the OpenSearch major version 3 (3.3.2) is available on Aiven for OpenSearch, only a few weeks after its upstream release! The major version 3 of OpenSearch is a foundational upgrade, built on a new, high-performance core, marking a significant step forward in performance and usability. This means that as an Aiven customer, you get immediate access to a faster, more efficient search experience, all fully managed.

How streaming architecture and vector databases power instant, personalised retail experiences.

The Valkey JSON module implements native JSON data type support within Valkey, allowing users to efficiently store, query, and modify complex, nested JSON data structures directly. This overcomes previous architectural complexities, such as needing to serialize entire documents as strings or flatten data into hashes, by providing native handling for nested data models.

Win $5,000 by building a cool project using Aiven’s new free tier Kafka, and sharing it online with or.

Introducing Aiven’s New PG AI Editor - A simpler, faster, developer-friendly way to work with PostgreSQL.

Traversing the Gap Between Sparse and Dense Vector Spaces.

How I used Aiven's free Kafka tier to monitor my smart bird feeder in real-time.

Fixing Kafka’s 80% problem with a serious fully managed free Kafka.

We benchmarked Diskless Kafka (KIP-1150) with 1 GiB/s in, 3 GiB/s out workload across three AZs. The cluster ran on just six m8g.4xlarge machines, sitting at <30% CPU, delivering ~1.6 seconds P99 end-to-end latency - all while cutting infra spend from ≈$3.32 M a year to under $288k a year. That’s a >94% cloud cost reduction. Extending Apache Kafka does come with an explicit tax.