Announcing Hazelcast Platform 5.4 Release

Introduction

The impact of solutions built on the Hazelcast Platform is visible in many aspects of our daily lives. It is a key technology that enables high-performance, scalable, and resilient systems for leading businesses you interact with. Whether you order food for online delivery, send money to a friend, purchase with a credit card, or play an online video game, Hazelcast Platform likely drives a significant part of the operations. You turn to the Hazelcast Platform to accelerate business speed by taking instant action on data-driven initiatives. Many of you have added real-time responsiveness to your systems with the Hazelcast Platform. Real-time systems are especially sensitive to downtime, so resilience is critical in a technology designed for 24/7 operations. These systems are easier to build, deploy, and maintain if you leverage a technology like Hazelcast Platform, designed to support real-time systems with stringent demands in a simplified, cost-effective way.

Data consistency in a fault-tolerant and scalable distributed system is critical in many applications today. Getting high performance and strong consistency takes time and effort. RDBMSs give you consistency but are extremely slow (relatively). Other distributed, consistent systems could be faster. Hazelcast Platform provides consistency across a distributed system to ensure accurate data.

As new trends emerge in the market, requirements for performance, scale, and resilience will continue to rise. As you pursue application modernization initiatives, rethink how software and data are deployed to create more business value. Moving from monolithic to event-driven architectures, especially those that leverage microservices, is just one example of gaining more speed from your digital operations. Leveraging the right technologies for these initiatives is also important because you can only get the advantages you seek if you explore innovations in the market.

Advanced artificial intelligence initiatives, especially those that entail large language models, will need more processing power and data. However, you remain cost-conscious, so there are better answers than an ever-expanding technology stack. Modern, scalable, and highly efficient software-based technologies like Hazelcast Platform are needed to extract the most power from hardware to overcome the cost and complexity challenges they face when trying to move forward with their existing architecture.

Advanced CP / CP Map

Advanced CP ensures strong consistency for key/value data structures, such as “maps,” in a distributed system. This means that any updates made to the data structure are immediately reflected across all nodes in the system, ensuring that all nodes always have access to the most up-to-date information. Furthermore, Advanced CP is designed to provide this level of consistency without sacrificing performance. This is achieved by a highly efficient consensus algorithm that can quickly and accurately determine the correct system state, even during network delays or failures. Advanced CP is a reliable and robust solution for managing key/value data in distributed systems. It allows you to build highly available, scalable, and fault-tolerant applications while ensuring your data is always accurate and up-to-date. We will focus our resources on improving Advanced CP in our Enterprise Edition, enabling us to offer you access to the latest and most advanced features and functionality.

Our enterprise edition provides additional support for mission-critical applications, including higher performance, advanced security features, and improved scalability. By investing in our Enterprise Edition, we can provide you with technology you can rely on for your most critical applications. Our goal is to continue delivering high-quality and innovative software that meets your needs, and we are confident that our enterprise edition will enable us to do just that.

Data consistency in a fault-tolerant and scalable distributed system is critical in many applications today. Getting high performance and strong consistency takes time and effort. RDBMSs give you consistency but are extremely slow (relatively). Other distributed, consistent systems could be faster. Hazelcast Platform provides consistency across a distributed system to ensure accurate data.

Thread-Per-Core

The Thread-per-core (TPC) architecture is a cutting-edge design pattern that has emerged as a powerful solution for improving hardware utilization and efficiency in multi-core CPUs. This design pattern assigns a separate thread to each CPU core, enabling the CPU to avoid resource contention and optimize its performance by simultaneously running independent tasks on each core. This significantly improves hardware efficiency and utilization, with a corresponding increase in the system’s overall performance. The benefits of this architecture are particularly relevant for FinOps initiatives, which aim to optimize financial operations by reducing costs and improving efficiency. By providing greater output with fewer resources, TPC can help organizations achieve their FinOps objectives more effectively. With the TPC architecture, we are committed to ongoing enhancements to optimize your performance further. This technology is the next step in our journey toward providing faster and more scalable solutions. As the technology evolves, we expect to see even greater hardware utilization and efficiency improvements in future releases.

Tiered Storage

Tiered Storage combines the speed of Hazelcast Platform fast data storage with the scale of SSD-based storage to deliver a balanced, cost-effective solution. By leveraging the strengths of in-memory and SSD-based storage, you can handle large data sets required by AI applications at an affordable cost. With Tiered Storage, you can achieve cost-effective scalability without compromising performance or efficiency. It is built on a tiered approach, where data is stored at different tiers based on frequency of access. This allows you to optimize performance while keeping costs low. Overall, Tiered Storage is a powerful and constructive solution that offers you a flexible and scalable storage solution with optimal performance at an affordable cost. It is an essential tool for businesses requiring efficient and effective management of large data sets, particularly those leveraging AI.

User Code Namespaces

User Code Namespaces provide a container for Java classpath resources, such as user code, and accompanying artifacts, such as property files and other resources. This helps you effectively manage access to resources in different namespaces through static or dynamic configuration. This is an Enterprise feature that extends and replaces the now deprecated User Code Deployment functionality. 

Connector Updates

• Kafka Connect Source connector is now generally available, thus Kafka Connect sources can scale across the whole cluster instead of just a single member.
• Mongo SQL Connector (SQL over MongoDB) is now generally available. With the addition of security support, you can now secure your data connection with TLS when creating MongoDB mappings over SQL.
• JDBC SQL Connector (SQL over JDBC) is now generally available. In addition to MySQL and PostgreSQL, the JDBC SQL connector now also supports Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server databases.

Getting Started

Hazelcast Platform 5.4 is available today and several resources can help you get started:

• Request a Hazelcast Platform trial license key
• What’s New in Hazelcast Platform 5.4 (Documentation)
• Learn more about Hazelcast Platform
• A new training course is available, Hazelcast Training: Strong Data Consistency 
• Join us for a walk-through of the new features in Hazelcast Platform 5.4 on May 9th