At Arcion, we believe in constantly evolving our solutions so that you have the best data replication experience. We’re happy to announce two key improvements to Arcion this September: Agentless CDC support and an intuitive GUI for Arcion Self-hosted. 

Let’s dive into both features and show you how to leverage them for your data projects.

Agentless Change Data Capture (CDC) 

In the past, for each database that you wanted to implement CDC, you would need to install an agent directly on the server, which was a time-consuming process. This could expose the production database systems to security threats, as well as add massive upgrade and admin burdens.

Now, you can forgo installing the agent and directly implement CDC, thanks to our new agentless feature in Arcion. We are proud to be the only 100% agentless CDC solution out there, and this applies to all our 20+ supported connectors. 

So why is agentless CDC such a big deal? Well, there are some major challenges when carrying out CDC through a database agent:

Operational Challenges

• Potential operational difficulties. If your data engineering team wants to deploy the solution, this means you’ll need to rely on a DBA or your DevOps team to deploy the agent and configure things. With an agentless solution, you don’t need such resources to deploy the solution (or manage it). Instead, you can manage your own software and CDC capabilities without depending on other teams’ availability.
  
  
• Scaling out CDC that requires agents can be tough. Imagine the nightmare of managing hundreds or thousands of instances, all requiring the installation and configuration of an agent to enable CDC. It’s not impossible, but definitely not the best approach. With agentless CDC, you can get scalable real-time data replication without the administrative nightmares and risks associated with running agent-based software on production environments.
  
  
• Many CDC agents are 3rd party and never get certified by the database vendor. Unless you're certified by the database vendor, DBAs and DevOps engineers will never have peace of mind deploying the agent as part of the solution. Even worse, when there is a new version of the agent, your DBAs & DevOps teams need to patch it into every single database. With agentless CDC, data engineers can now deploy streaming replication pipelines without extensive database administrative changes and IT reviews.

Performance & Security Challenges 

• Performance impact on the source database. Any time you’re running another process on the source database, you risk impacting the performance of the machine and the other software running on it. This can be detrimental if it’s a production system that business-critical apps rely on. The impact is usually quite noticeable since you are sharing all the servers' resources, such as the network and CPU with the agent. 

• Massive security concerns. Agents can expose a potential attack vector and allow for access to a supposedly secure server. In the past, using agents to enable CDC on Oracle allowed attackers to take control of an Oracle database instance. Agentless approaches allow you to address such security threats by preventing backdoor access to a secure system.

In short, agentless CDC reduces maintenance and administration costs, has major security improvements over traditional agents, and also makes configuration much easier.

Our engineering team has worked really hard to develop the state-of-the-art  agentless CDC for all supported databases. These include complex enterprise databases like: Oracle, SQL Server, Sybase, DB2 Mainframes, IBM Informix, SAP Hana and even modern open source databases like Postgres, MySQL, MongoDB, Cassandra and more (full connector list). 

Agentless CDC-based replication is also supported for a variety of data warehouses like Netezza, SAP Hana, BigQuery and Snowflake. Our solution is based on the native replication capabilities of the databases. Every Arcion agentless connector has been carefully designed and developed to ensure the setup is minimal and has no performance or security impact whatsoever on the source systems.

GUI Is Now Available With Arcion Self-Hosted

With the latest release, you can now use GUI to set up and deploy production-ready CDC pipelines - a seamless experience that you get with the Arcion Cloud. It reduces dependency on the CLI and lets you configure Arcion in a few clicks! 

At Arcion, we have an “API-first” approach to our interface. This means that every feature and capability is available through our CLI, which connects through the platform APIs. Arcion is a zero-code platform, but with high configurability to ensure adaptability to any environment. 

With the addition of the GUI to the self-hosted edition, Arcion users now have the flexibility to interact with the platform and set up robust and easy-to-implement data pipelines. 

Give Arcion a try!

With our latest release going live, there’s never been a better time to try Arcion. If your organization uses any of the supported databases, and wants to experience the power of agentless CDC, Arcion is the solution to implement. 

Enterprises can now replicate data in real time, at scale, with guaranteed delivery — but without the inherent performance issues, security concerns, and administrative burdens associated with the installation of proprietary software on database servers.

Ready to give it a go? Book a personalized demo today with our database experts, and ask all your questions in the Arcion Slack channel. 

We hope you enjoy the new release!