Hazelcast launches beta release of new serverless offering

Hazelcast has announced the beta release of a new serverless offering under its Viridian cloud portfolio.

Hazelcast Viridian Serverless enables companies to take immediate action on real-time data by speeding app development, simplifying provisioning, and enabling flexible and robust integration of real-time data into applications, the company states.

Viridian Serverless is a self-service provisioning process where no up-front sizing planning is needed because the cluster grows and shrinks automatically based on the workload.

Users get quick access to a horizontally scalable real-time data platform that includes a high-speed data store and stream processing capabilities.

With no need to worry about the underlying hardware configuration and any operational complexity, users can go from sign-up to deployment of a functional cluster in seconds, according to Hazelcast.

The flexibility and speed provide a more efficient development model that avoids over- and under-provisioning, and users can get started immediately with the free-for-life tier.

To celebrate the launch, Hazelcast will provide users with a limited-time offer of up to 2 Gibibytes (GiB) of data storage at no cost.

Hazelcast Viridian Dedicated is a fully-managed, single-tenant cluster designed for organisations that have clear, predictable usage models and/or want precision control over their own clusters.

Whereas users can choose the serverless model for development and unpredictable production workloads, customers requiring an enterprise-grade solution for production and predictable workloads will likely choose Viridian Dedicated for their company's needs.

The Hazelcast Viridian products are powered by the Hazelcast Platform, a real-time data platform and integrated runtime that combines distributed stream processing and real-time data management to immediately and automatically act on discovered patterns, trends, and anomalies.

This combination eliminates functions that create bottlenecks in other architectures, including database writes, batch processing, and the need for human intervention.

Manish Devgan, chief product officer of Hazelcast, says, "Real-time applications are hard to build on traditional data platforms, forcing businesses to compromise on their strategic aspirations.

"Hazelcast Viridian Serverless is the next step in providing a truly real-time cloud, all while making it even easier to develop, configure and deploy innovative applications.

"Our new serverless offering is the most seamless way to build and deploy cloud-native, real-time applications that will drive the next generation of competitive advantage.

The serverless edition is a technology of choice for the digital integration hub pattern, enabling companies to capture data from numerous sources and correlate the data immediately to create enhanced context for end users.

With this architecture, companies can accelerate web and mobile applications, gain a 360-degree customer view, track assets in real-time, prevent fraudulent transactions, deliver personalised recommendations, create real-time promotional offers, and more.

Hazelcast Viridian Serverless is also well-suited for stream processing environments that are the foundation for payment processing, internet of things analytics, and microservices messaging.

According to the company, features include:

• Self-service sign-up with a free-forever tier that will include a limited-time offer of 2GiB of in-memory storage
• Familiar, declarative API for building applications that leverage real-time streaming data
• Support for streaming SQL to enable a large base of developers to run queries on real-time data
• Out-of-the-box connectors to multiple cloud data sources, and an API for building custom connectors to any other data source
• Seamless integration with cloud deployments of popular data technologies, such as Apache Kafka
• Robust WAN replication capabilities that enable data integration across cloud deployments to support geo-distributed systems and disaster recovery strategies
• Change data capture (CDC) technology to allow real-time responsiveness to data updates
• Support for high-performance infrastructure to ensure maximum throughput and low latency that real-time systems require

Hazelcast Viridian Serverless is available on Amazon Web Services (AWS), with availability on Google Compute Platform (GCP) coming soon.

Also, Viridian Serverless offers a pay-as-you-consume monthly pricing model with built-in auto-scaling to meet resource requirements. Enterprises will only pay for what they need and can run cost-effective developer testing.

Hazelcast customers will soon also have the option of a contract-based licence that includes technical support.