News

MapR Open Source Analytics Pack Boosts Kafka and Kubernetes, Adds C#, Go

• By David Ramel
• February 7, 2019

MapR Technologies announced MapR Ecosystem Pack (MEP) 6.1, the latest release for the program that provides for independent updates of modular, open source data projects included in the firm's data platform.

Updated quarterly, MEP releases are bundled MapR Ecosystem projects labeled with specific versions. In the new v6.1 offering, MapR -- now an "AI and analytics" company -- said developers and data scientists gain maximum flexibility in accessing data and building artificial intelligence/machine learning, real-time analytics and stateful containerized applications.

"With the release of MEP 6.1, MapR expands on the Kafka ecosystem, adds new language support for the MapR document database and support for Container Storage Interface (CSI)," the company said in a news release yesterday (Feb. 6).

Expansion of the Kafka ecosystem -- a data stream processing platform -- entails a Kafka Schema Registry for formally defining and storing the structure of data streams to help data consumers better understand data producers. MapR said the registry provides centralized schema management and compatibility checks for evolving schemas.

Implementation of the CSI for Kubernetes provides persistent storage for compute running in Kubernetes-managed containers, which can future-proof Kubernetes-and-storage deployments, MapR said.

"The Container Storage Interface grew out of an open community effort with early input from Docker, Mesosphere, Cloud Foundry, Kubernetes, Google, and Dell as a way to provide greater flexibility, smoother experience, and wider adoption for container usage," said MapR's Ellen Friedman, a principal technologist, in a blog post yesterday. "CSI is the standard interface connection between your choice of application orchestration layer and the data persistence layer."

With new support for the Go and C# programming languages, developers working with the MapR document database can create a broader set of new applications in the language of their choice, MapR said. Supported languages now include Java, Python, Node.js, Go and C#. "New language bindings provide enhanced developer productivity on MapR Database and builds on the gRPC based thin client architecture and fully native language bindings with no dependencies," the company said.

The new release also includes other updates: Apache Drill 1.15 (schema-free SQL for Hadoop, NoSQL and cloud storage); and Oozie 5.1 (a workflow scheduler system to manage Hadoop jobs).