Aiven launches Runtime & DataHub for production AI

Aiven has launched two services, Runtime and DataHub, for companies using AI agents with production data. The release marks the Helsinki-based group's move into infrastructure for production AI agents.

Both products are now generally available as part of Aiven's broader data and AI cloud offering. They are designed to help businesses run AI agents and applications against live company data without moving that data outside existing customer environments.

Runtime provides an environment where AI agents and applications can run and take action using live company data. It is available on AWS and Google Cloud, with support for Microsoft Azure due later.

DataHub is designed to give AI agents more context about corporate data across existing systems. Aiven says it shows what data exists, what it means, where it came from, who owns it and who can use it.

Aiven said the launch builds on its existing position in managed open-source data infrastructure. Its portfolio includes Kafka for streaming, PostgreSQL for transactions, ClickHouse for analytics, Valkey for caching, OpenSearch for search and DataHub for governance.

The move reflects a broader shift among technology suppliers as businesses try to move AI tools from pilot projects into production. In that process, access to current internal data, along with controls over security, governance and interoperability, has become a central concern for companies deploying AI agents in operational environments.

Open source is also central to Aiven's pitch in this market. The company says DataHub is built on the open-source DataHub project and managed by Aiven, with unlimited users and no per-seat licensing.

Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder Oskari Saarenmaa presented the launch as part of a longer-term AI infrastructure strategy.

"A decade after our founding, we're seeing that open-source data foundations are also critical for production AI. That's because models and clouds will change, but the data underneath has to outlast both. Runtime and DataHub are the first two pieces of the AI agent infrastructure that we're building at Aiven, and there is so much more to come," said Oskari Saarenmaa, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder, Aiven.

One customer using DataHub is Dojo, the UK payments provider. Its Staff Engineer described the product as a way to bring together metadata and business context from systems that had previously been spread across separate silos.

"Our data was scattered across multiple data silos, making it difficult for agents to understand the context and relationship between them," said Elad Leev, Staff Engineer, Dojo. "Aiven DataHub gives us lineage, ownership, a shared glossary, basically our business context, in one place. This has helped us cut costs by retiring old dbt models and resolving problems in minutes that used to take hours."

Aiven also presented Runtime as part of a broader effort to make software deployment and use by developers and AI systems more straightforward. It linked that effort to the need for agents to have a controlled execution environment, data access and enough context to use information appropriately.

"Building, deploying and sharing software should be as easy as sharing a Google Doc," said Filip Yonov, Vice President Developer Services, Aiven. "Getting there means giving agents a place to run, access to the right data and enough context to use it responsibly. Runtime and DataHub are our first steps towards that future, built around Aiven's core strength: the production data customers already trust us to run."

Aiven is headquartered in Helsinki and operates across Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific.