MongoDB hits 8.0; Microsoft's open-source data project

Welcome to Runtime! Today on Product Saturday: MongoDB focuses on performance and resilience, Microsoft tackles event handling with a new open-source project, and the quote of the week.

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MongoDB 8.0 is GA: Software developers are very picky about their databases, and with good reason given the incredibly important role they play in just about every application. MongoDB has fought an uphill battle against the established database companies for more than a decade, and this week the eighth version of its flagship product became generally available.

MongoDB 8.0 promises 32% better throughput and 56% faster bulk writes thanks to a new approach to sharding, the technique for carving large datasets into smaller pieces that can be run across multiple servers. Chief Product Officer Sahir Azam also told The Register that the new approach improves the reliability of the database, which has been a concern about MongoDB for a very long time.

Microsoft introduces Drasi: It's no longer a surprise when Microsoft leans into open-source software, but it is notable. On Thursday the company released Drasi, an open-source project that "takes a lightweight approach to tracking system changes by watching for events in logs and change feeds, without copying data to a central data lake or repeatedly querying data sources," Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich said in a blog post.

After it tracks that activity, Drasi generates automatic reactions based on what it finds and what you tell it to do. The project has been submitted to the CNCF as a Sandbox project, and was released under the Apache 2.0 license.

OpenStack is still alive: Broadcom might have done more to revive interest in OpenStack than anything else anybody has tried over the last decade, thanks to its handling of the VMware acquisition. Wednesday the OpenInfra Foundation released the 30th version of the project, which was once envisioned as AWS-in-a-box for wannabe cloud competitors but settled into a decidedly less exciting role as an infrastructure project for telecom companies.

“I did not have ‘VMware sparks OpenStack resurgence’ on my 2024 bingo card,” OpenInfra Foundation Executive Director Jonathan Bryce told TechCrunch. But that appears to be exactly what is happening, as VMware customers unhappy with Broadcom's price increases look for something else to manage their on-premises infrastructure.

Ray of light: Anyscale is growing quickly as companies look for help scaling their AI infrastructure, and the open-source project Ray is at the heart of its product strategy. This week the company put on the Ray Summit in San Francisco and unveiled several enhancements to the project, which Anyscale supports and runs as a managed service.

Ray is now optimized for GPUs — which feels like the kind of thing somebody should have tackled a while ago — and supports unstructured data, allowing it to read data stored in open data formats like Delta Lake, Hudi, and Iceberg. Anyscale also introduced a high-performance version of Ray called RayTurbo that is only available through the company and promises 4.5x faster data processing with lower costs.

SolarWinds wants to watch your data: If you'd told somebody three years ago that SolarWinds would plunge headlong into the observability market — which requires customers to trust it with a ton of sensitive data — they probably would have chuckled, given the fallout from one of the worst supply-chain hacks ever. But that's exactly what the company did this week, emphasizing its hybrid cloud approach.

SolarWinds Observability can be self-hosted or managed by the company, and promises to detect performance issues on AWS and Azure, as well as across a customer's fleet of self-managed servers. Dozens of companies are jockeying for position when it comes to observability, which could become one of the more important sectors of enterprise infrastructure over the rest of the decade.

A MESSAGE FROM CHRONOSPHERE

Chronosphere has been named a Leader in the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Observability Platforms based on its ability to execute and completeness of vision. Gain complimentary access to the report to find out why Chronosphere was recognized as a Leader, learn how to best evaluate observability platforms, and gain valuable insights into the entire observability space.

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Stat of the week

Given the high-profile ransomware cases that have caught national attention over the last year, one would think companies are scrambling to figure out how to best protect their networks and assets from cybercrime. However, according to a survey conducted by PwC, 88% of tech executives believe measuring their risk of a cyberattack is important but only 15% of their organizations are actually doing that.

Quote of the week

"Planning and reasoning is very hard. It's hard for humans to do, it's much harder for machines to do." — Ashok Srivastava, chief data officer at Intuit, on the rise of AI agents that can take action based on what they're told.

The Runtime roundup

Microsoft somehow lost a bunch of logs intended for Microsoft Entra and Defender customers, according to Business Insider, which is not a great look.

More than 150 Automattic employees took up CEO Matt Mullenweg's offer to resign if they disagreed with his decision to lock antlers with WP Engine, which is not a great look.

A MESSAGE FROM CHRONOSPHERE

Evaluating observability platforms? Get complimentary access to the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Observability Platforms to see this year's evaluation and how the Observability space is evolving.

Get the Report.

Thanks for reading — see you Tuesday!