Aiven, which provides fully-managed and hosted services for major open source projects including Kafka, Cassandra, and Grafana, has announced its first ever acquisition -- the Finnish company has snapped up Kafkawize, a self-service open source data governance tool for Apache Kafka. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The acquisition comes amid a renewed focus on the security of open source software, with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently warning of legal action against any organization that failed to patch the much-publicized Log4j flaw which emerged last year. Elsewhere, a new bipartisan U.S. Senate bill called the Securing Open Source Software Act emerging last week to help bolster open source software, particularly in relation to how it's leveraged in federal agencies.

Securing open source

Founded out of Helsinki in 2016, Aiven essentially solves many of the headaches involving in running open source software, which permeates just about every modern technology stack. From scripts that speed up servers to databases and beyond, open source is what makes the modern software world tick. But open source software is time-consuming to configure, deploy, and maintain, which is where Aiven enters the fray by absorbing much of the heavylifting involved in running and securing open source data infrastructure across all the main public clouds, freeing up companies to focus on building their core "differentiated" products.

Fresh from a $210 million fundraise that valued it at $3 billion, Aiven is now doubling down on its existing support for Kafka, an open source data streaming project that emerged from LinkedIn back in 2011. Some 80% of Fortune 100 companies apparently use Kafka to access real-time data in their applications, essential for use-cases such as matching passengers with drivers in ride-sharing apps or processing ecommerce payments.

Kafkawize, for its part, is an open source project started back in 2018 by Murali Basani to help companies embed proper data governance across their Kafka deployments, specifically around the hundreds of "topics" Kafka generates -- a topic is basically a category name to which records are organized and stored. This raises significant security questions, including who is authorized to create and consume a topic -- and who owns it? Moreover, how does a company backup their Kafka configuration?