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Mike Vizard, Techstrong
Kurrent, formerly known as Event Store, today revealed it has made available an enterprise edition of its streaming database that IT teams can deploy in the cloud or in an on-premises IT environment.
Fresh off raising an additional $12 million in funding, Kurrent CEO Kirk Dunn said the goal is to provide IT teams with more deployment options for an instance of an open-source streaming database that enables organizations to track and analyze billions of events as they occur across billions of streams of data. In the case of the Kurrent database, the event itself is now the atomic unit being stored, noted Dunn.
Kurrent already provides a managed database service based on Kurrent and is now providing commercial support to IT teams that prefer to manage IT environments themselves. Additional capabilities provided in the enterprise edition include a single binary for streamlined deployment, enterprise connectors for improved integration with platforms such as Kafka, MongoDB and RabbitMQ, automated scavenging for simplified maintenance, policy-based stream authorization for enhanced security, and encryption at rest.
As more compute capacity has become available, it’s become feasible to deploy a database that is designed to track not just what occurred but also how and why, said Dunn. Organizations have been adopting streaming platforms such as Kafka to move data as needed, but the Kurrent database combines the ability to stream data with an underlying database. That approach eliminates the need to have to have two separate platforms to move, store and analyze data, said Dunn.
In an era where organizations now need to process and analyze data in near real-time, that capability is rapidly becoming essential, he added. Kurrent eliminates the traditional divide between event-oriented application logic and state-based data models to provide application developers with a single platform to store application data in its native event format while streaming curated operational or analytical data downstream. That capability simplifies data modeling, eliminates the dual-write problem, and ensures the delivery of the highest integrity data directly to downstream systems, applications and services.
In addition, Kurrent can provide artificial intelligence (AI) models access to a source of data that doesn’t require IT teams to prepare data using, for example, a vector database.
It’s not clear how many IT organizations are at this moment able to support yet another type of database, but as the need to process and analyze data in real time becomes critical to drive event-driven applications, the limitations of legacy databases will become more apparent. In fact, one of the reasons building event-driven applications is so challenging today is because reconciling all the data requires application developers to understand the intricacies of multiple platforms.
It’s not likely new approaches to managing and processing data will replace the need for legacy platforms any time soon, but as IT continues to evolve, it doesn’t always follow that approach to solving challenges that were developed more than a decade ago that aren’t necessarily always going to say relevant as application use cases continue to evolve and expand.