kdb Insights Enterprise on Azure is now General Availability (GA)

By Harry Darell Brown

KX and Microsoft have announced the release of kdb Insights Enterprise on Azure, the high-performance time series analytics engine for MLOps and Cloud data pipelines enabling business users, application developers and data scientists to collaborate in building massively scalable, enterprise-impacting, insights-rich, data-driven applications quickly and easily

KX is the provider of kdb+, the fastest and most efficient data analytics engine in the cloud, which is used to capture and process high-volume, high-velocity data across a range of industries including finance, manufacturing, automotive and healthcare. kdb Insights Enterprise on Azure extends kdb+ with the expansive catalog of Azure services overlaying a low code and pro code programming approach. Deploy Azure blob storage, containerization, security, microservices, cloud-native resilience and high availability to enable quick, flexible deployment of lightning-fast query speeds and advanced vector math into Azure data architectures and MLOps and DevOps pipelines for 100x faster, more configurable and massively scalable analytics.

kdb Insights Enterprise on Azure benefits forward-thinking data science and machine learning workflows in particular. It provides teams with an intuitive drag-and-drop interface to manage data pipelines and include Python and SQL to incorporate rich queries and analytics. Together, data application developers, data scientists and data engineers can collaborate to build data-driven cloud native analytics rapidly, and leverage the simplicity, resilience, high availability and autoscaling capacity of the Azure ecosystem. Machine Learning or Model Ops (MLOps) workflows of cloud-centric historical queries, model training, feature store populations, streaming analytics and real-time model inference is merely a few clicks and minutes away. See how quickly in the video below!

Available on Azure Marketplace, giving instant access to Azure services under existing agreements and supported by their SLAs, kdb Insights Enterprise on Azure helps organizations achieve up to 100x time-series performance at 1/10th of the cost of lake, warehouse and other solutions.

Easier Insights

kdb Insights Enterprise on Azure includes:

• An intuitive user interface which enables users to define, amend and share data pipelines, for ingesting, uploading, transforming, modeling and publishing data
• Python, SQL, and Postgres interoperability for data scientists and data engineers to enhance and customize out-of-the-box analytics, and immediately query and process data
• Docker and Kubernetes support for flexible deployment, scalability, service orchestration, and resilient architectures
• Direct access to Azure blob storage and pluggable containerized microservices for quick, easy connectivity to capture and process data through its lifecycle
• Further integration to Azure services like Active Directory for identity and authorization management, Azure Monitoring for maintenance and observability and PowerBI for visualization
• OpenAPI and REST APIs provide quick, easy connectivity to share and augment insights with users and systems across the organization
• And all available via an easy-to-deploy marketplace configuration wizard – third-party prerequisites, infrastructure & installation of the application is simple and quick

The system enables the storage and sharing of data pipelines, schemas, and assemblies that describe the structure of a dataset, its life cycle, and the services that operate upon it.  Define and run SQL and Python functions, and apply transformations within data pipelines like windowing, filtering, and machine learning.

kdb Insights Enterprise on Azure is deployed with just a small number of clicks that provisions the system, freeing the user from architecture, hardware or infrastructure set-up concerns.

Use cases built upon kdb Insights Enterprise on Azure range from algorithmic trading and automated risk management in finance to anomaly detection, predictive analytics observability across high-volume time series data manufacturing, healthcare and telecommunications.

It leverages key Azure services such as:

Pre-configured alerts to help you monitor and maintain the health of your kdb Insights Enterprise activity on Azure Marketplace. See here how to activate or deactivate your alerts. List of alerts and their triggering thresholds automatically deployed includes quota, logger, CPU utilization and disk space alerts and many more. Use Azure Active Directory (AAD), get single-factor multifactor authentication and conditional access to guard against cybersecurity attacks Microsoft Power BI Desktop. Populate the specified template, access your Resource Group in the Azure Portal, and follow the instructions in the documentation

Other general-purpose features that make development easier and more configurable include:

Python functionality enables data engineers and data scientists to build complex pipelines and aggregations from within the UI reusing their existing skills and pre-existing libraries. Support for custom analytics enables users to add User-Defined Functionality and modify functionality for real time machine learning predictions, model training and data investigation. Diagnostics and notifications provide instant feedback and access to root causes of underlying issues within the development lifecycle to enable fast accurate delivery of functionality. Fast, easy loading of historical data in a range of formats including csv, JSON, IPC, arrow and streaming gzip, optimized for minimal impact on performance, for advanced querying machine learning and trend analysis Sharing read-only dashboards to facilitate enterprise-wide insights and data-driven decision-making

Embrace the Cloud with Simplicity. Simply leverage Azure

kdb Insights Enterprise on Azure allows data engineers, DevOps and CloudOps teams to modernize their data applications as they embrace the cloud and take advantage of Azure’s proven capability for innovative data science and MLOps pipelines. Given kdb Insights Enterprise on Azure’s capacity to store and process vast amounts of both streaming and historical data – wherever it resides across the pipeline – while ensuring high resilience, seamless failover and high availability, kdb Insights Enterprise is a particularly powerful medium for machine learning. Data scientists can concentrate on building powerful collaborative notebooks that analyse more data, leverage machine learning research code sets, and reduce time to deployment. In the words of one client:

 Pre-KX, more than 80 percent of our time was taken to get the data into a form that permitted good data science from the test result. KX means our engineers can spend time on science and not data transformation.

With kdb Insights Enterprise on the Azure Marketplace, deploy pipelines in minutes, hours and days, not in weeks or months. Populate them with data, and make valuable decisions in instantaneous 100x faster and, when required, in real-time.

Click here for more information on kdb Insights Enterprise on Azure or go to this link for a free trial .