LinkedIn's Kafka Monitor, Apple's Siri Are Set Free: Big Data Roundup

6 Barriers To IoT Data Flow

LinkedIn released another big data technology to open source. Confluent announced version 3.0 of its platform. Apple prepares to open its AI assistant Siri to developers. Big data graph computing framework TinkerPop is now a Top-Level Project at the Apache Software Foundation. We have all that and more in our Big Data Roundup for the week ending May 29, 2016.

Let's start with the news from LinkedIn. The careers social media hub known for incubating the big data streaming technology Apache Kafka has released a new technology to open source that's designed to enhance the Kafka experience for organizations. The company announced it is releasing Kafka Monitor to open source. It's available now on Github under Apache 2.0 License.

The technology is meant to provide a simple way to reliably measure the availability of Kafka clusters, according to Dong Lin, software engineer at LinkedIn, who announced the release on the organization's engineering blog.

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Lin said that Kafka Monitor is a framework for monitoring and testing Kafka deployments, and it fixes some of the issues developers have faced with the process in the past.

Confluent 3.0

Speaking of Kafka, Confluent, the LinkedIn spinoff created as the commercial entity distributing Apache Kafka, has released version 3.0 of its Confluent Platform. In a blog post, CTO Neha Narkhede announced the release of both Apache Kafka 0.10 and the newest version of the Confluent Platform.

"For organizations that want to build a streaming data pipeline around Apache Kafka, Confluent Platform is the easiest way to get started," she wrote. "As the creators of Apache Kafka, we learned from our own and others' experiences as some of the largest companies in the world transitioned to a central stream data platform and have assembled an open-source, well-tested and fully supported platform of extensions on Kafka that make it more capable and easier to deploy and operate."

The platform includes Kafka Streams, certified and tested connectors to other data sources, C and Python clients, and a REST proxy to enable production and consumption of messages from applications built in any language.

TinkerPop Now a Top-Level Project

In other open source big data news, TinkerPop has graduated from its incubator program to Top-Level Project status in the Apache Software Foundation. TinkerPop is a graph computing framework that provides developers with tools needed to build modern graph applications in any application domain and at any scale, according to a statement issued by ASF.

"Graph databases and mainstream interest in graph applications have seen tremendous growth in recent years," said Stephen Mallette, VP of Apache TinkerPop and a software engineer at DataStax. Current users of TinkerPop include DataStax, IBM, and Amazon.

Apple Siri Prepares to Welcome Developers

Not to be outdone by rival Amazon and Google in the AI home assistant market, Apple is reportedly getting ready to open its Siri voice service to third-party applications. Amazon already has a product in this market called Amazon Echo. Google recently announced plans to release Google Assistant packaged into the Google Home device later this year.

An Apple device reported to be in development is expected to be able to turn on music playlists, set timers and alarms, and read the news. The device is also reportedly designed to work with Apple's Homekit platform, so it can turn on and off appliances via voice commands.