About Ververica Unified Streaming Data Platform

This topic introduces Ververica Unified Streaming Data Platform and its underlying engine, features, and architecture.

Ververica Unified Streaming Data Platform at its core is about data. You can think of the platform as having two purposes: managing the data itself and making it easy for you to use your data.

Ververica Unified Streaming Data Platform comprises three layers:

• VERA, the Ververica run-time assembly that powers the Ververica Streaming Data Platform.
• VERA's core pillars that support its cloud-native architecture, streamline the integration with the underlying technology stack, optimize stream processing, and enhance usability.
• Enterprise features that enable you to use, monitor, manage, secure, and visualize the data.

Engine

The first layer of the platform is VERA, or the engine that powers the platform. It runs on an open-core technology stack and is fully compatible with Apache Flink so you can move between vendor and open-source Flink. With its Ververica-built optimizations and advanced CDC connectors, it addresses some of the challenges of Flink and evolves Flink to run natively in modern cloud environments.

Pillars

The three core pillars of VERA are: Streaming Data Movement, Real-time Stream Processing, and Streaming on the Lakehouse (what Ververica calls “Streamhouse”). These three pillars are at the heart of the Ververica story. The core pillars provide a one-stop shop for all data needs - whether you are processing, storing, or moving data.

• Streaming Data Movement is the end-to-end process of moving data through VERA by loading data generated from various applications and systems (in various formats and volumes) and transforming it into a uniform type, continuously processing data in real-time, and consuming the processed data and putting it into destination systems.

• Real-time Stream Processing involves collecting and ingesting data from various data sources, and processing that data in real time to extract meaning and insight. VERA, is designed for stateful stream processing and streaming analytics, processing data in real time. It can support both data-at-rest (batch data pipelines / data stored in object stores) and data-in-motion (streaming pipelines / real-time use cases).

• Streaming on the Lakehouse or Streamhouse provides stream processing capabilities while maintaining near-real-time results on the data lake. It provides the best of both worlds: historically, streaming (real-time) is super low latency but very costly, while traditional Lakehouse (batch) is slow (high latency) but cheap. Streamhouse treats Batch as a type of stream, providing both real-time stream processing ability as well as achieving near-real-time on the data lake (batch).

These core pillars enable multi-cloud support, meaning our SaaS and BYOC deployments on the three biggest hyperscalers (public cloud vendors): Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.

See VERA Core Pillars or VERA: The Path to Cloud-Native Apache Flink for more information.

Enterprise Features

The Ververica Unified Streaming Data Platform enables solutions to customer pain points and use cases:

• Developer efficiency via an integrated development environment and efficient enterprise tooling for all our customer’s development needs, maximizing performance and productivity while minimizing resource use.
• Operational excellence means streamlined operations with features that enable continuous improvement, observability, optimization, and management of data streaming infrastructures. Result: data-driven decisions based on enhanced efficiency, effectiveness and agility.
• Elasticity is automatic and dynamic scaling of resources and storage up or down as needed.
• Data Governance via a framework, or set of integrated business capabilities, that help our users to set, enforce, and monitor policies on platform resources and data. Users can evaluate and implement a diverse set of governance policies and monitor and enforce those policies across their organizations’ business systems.
• Security via mechanisms to protect sensitive, private data, and ensure it is in compliance with regulatory standards at both data and user access levels.
• Multi-Tenancy via role-based access control, to run many independent applications in a shared environment and isolate resources and data at the namespace and tenant level
• Available Everywhere allows you to meet your requirements for service and deployment models.

See also this blog article.

Regions and zones

To create a workspace in Ververica Cloud, you must specify a cloud service provider and region. This is the current list of cloud providers and regions supported in Ververica Cloud:

Amazon Web Services (AWS) regions:

• Europe:
  • eu-central-1 (Frankfurt / Germany)
• United States:
  • us-west-1 (N. California)
  • us-east-1 (N. Virginia)

Offering types

For the latest offering types and pricing, see this page.

Ververica Cloud provides the following offering types:

• Pay-as-you-go (PAYG): Users are charged for the capacity they have used at the end of the billing period. Billing for each Ververica Cloud component accrues at hourly intervals. Any usage of less than an hour is billed for the entire hour. Users can create up to 10 PAYG workspaces.
• Reserved capacity (RC): Users are charged continuously for all purchased reserved capacity workspaces, and are charged at the end of the billing period. Billing items are aggregated on an hourly basis for Data Transfer and RC bundles per region (per hour).

note

Billing/charging applies at the user account level. Users will be billed by the hour for all the workspaces they own, and charged at the end of the current billing period. Only the workspace owner can specify the payment method for a workspace. Billing accrues hourly, with a monthly-in-arrears invoicing cycle. If you stop using resources during a billing period (for example by deleting a workspace), or if you exceed the resources allocated for the current billing period, the current billing period will stop and an invoice will immediately be generated for the resources used. A new billing period will commence if you continue to use resources.

All billing computations are conducted in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

Offering type features

The following table shows a high-level comparison of features across Ververica Cloud offering types:

Feature	PAYG	RC
Performance	No guarantees	No oversubscription
Billing	Hourly	Hourly
Proration	Hourly	Hourly
CU limit per workspace	50	Bundle (20, 30, 50, custom)
Free trial available?	Yes, Free-to-Start	No
Cancellation	At any time	At any time
Custom promotions?	Yes	Yes
Billing period	Monthly	Monthly
Payment details required?	Mandatory	Mandatory

Benefits of Ververica Unified Streaming Data Platform

• Flexible deployment options to fit any business needs or use cases
• Cloud Services provided through SaaS model
• Cloud economics and elasticity
• Self-service
• Pay-as-you-go and Reserved Capacity consumption models
• Centralized hub with unified mix-and-match offerings and deployment modes
• Rapid on-demand services with flexible subscription lifecycles
• Self-managed deployment for teams with highly sensitive data

Related topics

• To learn more about the dashboard and console, see Ververica Cloud interface overview
• To create your first deployment, see Get started.