Fivetran on Wednesday introduced Hybrid Deployment, a feature that enables customers to develop and run data pipelines within their own secure environments rather than having to run all workloads on the vendor’s managed platform.
While many enterprises have no problems running data integration workloads in a vendor’s cloud environment, some, such as those in highly regulated industries need those workloads to be tightly managed and are better suited by private clouds or on-premises deployments.
Hybrid Deployment lets such customers control their Fivetran workloads from those private clouds or on-premises systems to ensure security and compliance, which is significant because it enables Fivetran to better meet the needs of certain customers as well as potentially reach new ones, according to Doug Henschen, an analyst at Constellation Research.
The vendor has grown rapidly since 2012 by serving customers that store data in cloud-based platforms such as Amazon Redshift, Databricks, Google BigQuery, Microsoft Azure and Snowflake, he noted. Hybrid Deployment enables Fivetran to reach new potential customers as well as existing ones that store data in multiple environments.
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“Now that the company is maturing, it’s clearly looking to reach new and existing customers that have significant on-premises requirements and need to either move data into the cloud or handle integrations on premises,” Henschen said.
Based in Oakland, Calif., Fivetran is a data integration specialist. The vendor’s broad network of connectors enables customers to ingest data from their sources into databases, data warehouses and data lakes where it can be integrated with similar data to form datasets for analytics and AI applications.
To date, Fivetran has raised over $850 million in total funding, including $125 million in debt financing in May 2023 that was intended as a hedge against a potential economic downturn. Earlier in 2023, the vendor added a set of high-volume connectors and unveiled an integration with Monte Carlo to add data observability capabilities at the point of ingestion.
Hybrid Deployment
Enterprise data is complex. It comes from myriad sources in an array of forms and contains different types of information.
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Some of it is simple and straightforward. It can be ingested from its original source and moved into a system on a public cloud where it can then be prepared for analysis. It needs to be kept secure because it often it contains proprietary information that if leaked could lead to a competitive disadvantage for an enterprise. But it doesn’t contain data that, if accidentally exposed, could violate privacy regulations or result in other harm to an organization.
Other data is more sensitive. For example, it could contain personally identifiable information that if exposed would lead to a regulatory violation.
As a result, enterprises often keep such data in their own environment so it never gets moved — even through secure channels — into an external system such as a public cloud or a vendor’s platform. Private clouds are one method of keeping data more secure.. On premises databases are another.
To meet the needs of those organizations subject to greater regulatory oversight than most others or that deal with large amounts of sensitive information, established data integration vendors such as Boomi, Informatica and SnapLogic provide hybrid deployment capabilities.
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Meanwhile, Fivetran is not long out of its startup phase, Henschen pointed out.
“Fivetran is a fairly young, cloud-focused company,” he said.
As a result, though it competes with mature vendors, its most similar peers are other data integration vendors still attempting to mature such as AirByte, DBT Labs and Matillion. Now, as it attempts to grow, Fivetran is adding certain capabilities that more evolved vendors already provide.
Hybrid Deployment, therefore, represents Fivetran’s own effort to meet the needs of organizations subject to strict regulatory oversight or that deal with large amounts of sensitive data. Such organizations often struggle to develop systems that enable data-informed decision-making, the vendor noted.
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With Hybrid Deployment, Fivetran is supplying them with the means to integrate data without it ever leaving their secure environment in what Kevin Petrie, an analyst at BARC U.S. called a logical next step in its development.
“Fivetran first distinguished itself as a simple, cost-effective way to move data from many SaaS applications in the cloud to cloud-based data warehouses such as Snowflake,” he said.
Later, in 2021 in conjunction with raising $565 million in funding, Fivetran acquired HVR, adding capabilities that enabled customers to extract data from on-premises databases, Petrie noted.
“Their new hybrid capabilities extend this strategy by enabling Fivetran customers to manage and govern data pipelines on premises as well as in one or more clouds,” he said.
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While Hybrid Deployment is an evolution for Fivetran, providing enterprise-grade capabilities that its more mature competitors also provide, the impetus for its development came from customer feedback, according to chief operating officer Taylor Brown, a Fivetran co-founder..
Certain customers use Fivetran for some of their data integration and movement, but without being able to manage their data in their own environments were unable to use Fivetran for all their data movement and integration needs.
The security fears that cause certain organizations to avoid using public clouds to manage data are not unfounded, Brown noted. For Fivetran to serve their needs, they required something more from the vendor.
“These customers might use Fivetran for most data sources but have to rely on cumbersome DIY or self-hosted solutions for the most sensitive of sources,” Brown said. “Fivetran’s Hybrid Deployment … provides them with the flexibility to maintain full control over sensitive data while benefiting from the ease and scalability of a managed service.”
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Hybrid Deployment provides Fivetran users with a single control pane from which they can manage all data sources, whether they are in public clouds, private clouds or on premises.
Intended benefits include the following, according to Fivetran:
Full visibility by enabling customers to monitor all their data pipelines from a single interface in their own environment rather than Fivetran’s.
Security features that let users set access controls, mask sensitive data and track data as it moves through pipelines to ensure that it remains compliant.
Compatibility across multiple environments including on premises, private clouds and public clouds such as AWS, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure.
Cost control by providing customers with detailed reporting tools and enabling them to track their usage.
Pipeline scalability and customization to meet an organization’s unique needs.
Simple setup.
While all are valuable, compatibility across environments and cost management are potentially the most significant for Fivetran customers, according to Henschen.
Independent vendors such as Fivetran tend to address compatibility better than tech giants that provide data integration tools as part of larger data management offerings, he noted. Meanwhile, cost management measures are critical as more workloads are moved to the cloud and cloud spending increases for enterprises.
“All [the intended benefits] are important and ones that many integration vendors try to address,” Henschen said. “The ones that stand out to me are compatibility across environments … and cost management, which is really crucial to all customers but not all vendors address the need adequately.”
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Petrie likewise highlighted the cost control features as particularly notable. Being able to accurately predict cloud spending is critical for enterprises, especially as they increase their investments in generative AI, traditional AI and machine learning fueled by technological advances such as the evolution of large language models and added compute power.
“I like their ability to monitor utilization and consumption of pipeline resources from a cost standpoint,” he said. “This supports FinOps initiatives in which enterprises aim to predict, measure, optimize and govern cloud-related costs.”
Looking ahead
With Hybrid Deployment now part of Fivetran’s platform, the vendor’s aim is to continue adding features that ultimately make access to data as simple and reliable as possible, according to Brown.
Specifically, the vendor’s roadmap includes adding tools that provide more support for customers as they develop AI and machine learning workloads, including further addressing data security and compliance.
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One such tool will combine the capabilities of Hybrid Deployment and Fivetran Managed Data Lake to enable any organization — whether dealing with large volumes of sensitive data or not — to use their unstructured data to help train AI models and applications.
Unstructured data, often stored in data lakes, now makes up more than three-quarters of all data and is key to training AI models and applications. Unstructured data, however, is not easy to integrate with structured data to provide enterprises with a complete view of their operations.
“As AI workloads and applications continue to be top-of-mind for customers, we’ll be building more functionality into the platform to support those efforts,” Brown said.
Eric Avidon is a senior news writer for TechTarget Editorial and a journalist with more than 25 years of experience. He covers analytics and data management.
Last month, two young paddleboarders found themselves stranded in the ocean, pushed 2,000 feet from the shore by strong winds and currents. Thanks to the deployment of a drone, rescuers kept an eye on them the whole time and safely brought them aboard a rescue boat within minutes.
In North Carolina, the Oak Island Fire Department is one of a few in the country using drone technology for ocean rescues. Firefighter-turned-drone pilot Sean Barry explained the drone’s capabilities as it was demonstrated on a windy day.
“This drone is capable of flying in all types of weather and environments,” Barry said.
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Equipped with a camera that can switch between modes — including infrared to spot people in distress — responders can communicate instructions through a speaker. It also can carry life-preserving equipment.
The device is activated by a CO2 cartridge when it comes in contact with water. Once triggered, it inflates into a long tube, approximately 26 inches long, providing distressed swimmers something to hold on to.
In a real-life rescue, after a 911 call from shore, the drone spotted a swimmer in distress. It released two floating tubes, providing the swimmer with buoyancy until help arrived.
Like many coastal communities, Oak Island’s population can swell from about 10,000 to 50,000 during the summer tourist season. Riptides, which are hard to detect on the surface, can happen at any time.
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Every year, about 100 people die due to rip currents on U.S. beaches. More than 80% of beach rescues involve rip currents, if you’re caught in one, rescuers advise to not panic or try to fight it, but try to float or swim parallel to the coastline to get out of the current.
Oak Island Fire Chief Lee Price noted that many people underestimate the force of rip currents.
“People are, ‘Oh, I’m a good swimmer. I’m gonna go out there,’ and then they get in trouble,” Price said.
For Price, the benefit of drones isn’t just faster response times but also keeping rescuers safe. Through the camera and speaker, they can determine if someone isn’t in distress.
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Price said many people might not be aware of it.
“It’s like anything as technology advances, it takes a little bit for everybody to catch up and get used to it,” said Price.
In a demonstration, Barry showed how the drone can bring a safety rope to a swimmer while rescuers prepare to pull the swimmer to shore.
“The speed and accuracy that this gives you … rapid deployment, speed, accuracy, and safety overall,” Price said. “Not just safety for the victim, but safety for our responders.”
Manuel Bojorquez is a CBS News national correspondent based in Miami. He joined CBS News in 2012 as a Dallas-based correspondent and was promoted to national correspondent for the network’s Miami bureau in January 2017.
It’s been quite some time since we heard anything about Netflix’s animated adaptation of Splinter Cell — but the streamer has finally provided some details on the show. The reveal comes in the form of a very brief teaser trailer, which shows a little bit of the show, but mostly showcases Liev Schreiber’s gravelly take on lead character Sam Fisher. We also have a proper name now: it’s called Splinter Cell: Deathwatch.
Correspondent Conor Knighton visits New Jersey beaches along the Delaware Bay to learn about horseshoe crabs – mysterious creatures that predate dinosaurs – whose very blood has proved vital to keeping humans healthy by helping detect bacterial endotoxins. He talks with environmentalists about the decline in the horseshoe crab population, and with researchers who are pushing the pharmaceutical industry to switch its use of horseshoe crab blood with a synthetic alternative used in medical testing.
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Strands is the NYT’s latest word game after the likes of Wordle, Spelling Bee and Connections – and it’s great fun. It can be difficult, though, so read on for my Strands hints.
SPOILER WARNING: Information about NYT Strands today is below, so don’t read on if you don’t want to know the answers.
Your Strands expert
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Your Strands expert
Marc McLaren
NYT Strands today (game #201) – hint #1 – today’s theme
What is the theme of today’s NYT Strands?
• Today’s NYT Strands theme is… A way with words
NYT Strands today (game #201) – hint #2 – clue words
Play any of these words to unlock the in-game hints system.
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DIRTY
STRICT
POSE
POSED
DEAN
DOSE
NYT Strands today (game #201) – hint #3 – spangram
What is a hint for today’s spangram?
• A bard’s domain
NYT Strands today (game #201) – hint #4 – spangram position
What are two sides of the board that today’s spangram touches?
First: left, 4th row
Last: right, 5th row
Right, the answers are below, so DO NOT SCROLL ANY FURTHER IF YOU DON’T WANT TO SEE THEM.
NYT Strands today (game #201) – the answers
(Image credit: New York Times)
The answers to today’s Strands, game #201, are…
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RHYME
VERSE
METER
STANZA
SYNTAX
DICTION
SCANSION
SPANGRAM: POETRY
My rating: Moderate
My score: 2 hints
I’ve never been a fan of poetry, though I love words and language. Set it to music and it’s a different matter – and I guess the best lyricists are also poets. But ask me to talk about SCANSION and STANZAs and I’m a little lost. All of which is a way of justifying why I needed two hints to complete what for some people will probably be a fairly simple Strands puzzle.
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I worked out what the theme was early on, with the clue of ‘A way with words’ and the fact that I found RHYME by accident combining to set me on the right track. But though I spotted a couple more, I couldn’t get them all without needing a helping hand for METER and STANZA. After that I spotted the spangram, and the others were solved pretty much by a combination of guesswork and my modicum of knowledge.
Yesterday’s NYT Strands answers (Thursday 19 September, game #200)
SPIDER
MILLIPEDE
BEETLE
TERMITE
EARWIG
SPANGRAM: CREEPYCRAWLIES
What is NYT Strands?
Strands is the NYT’s new word game, following Wordle and Connections. It’s now out of beta so is a fully fledged member of the NYT’s games stable and can be played on the NYT Games site on desktop or mobile.
I’ve got a full guide to how to play NYT Strands, complete with tips for solving it, so check that out if you’re struggling to beat it each day.
A blockchain entrepreneur, a cinematographer, a polar adventurer and a robotics researcher plan to fly around Earth’s poles aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule by the end of the year, becoming the first humans to observe the ice caps and extreme polar environments from orbit, SpaceX announced Monday.
The historic flight, launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, will be commanded by Chun Wang, a wealthy bitcoin pioneer who founded f2pool and stakefish, “which are among the largest Bitcoin mining pools and Ethereum staking providers,” the crew’s website says.
The Fram2 crew, seen during a visit to SpaceX’s Hawthorn, Calif., manufacturing facility. Left to right: Eric Philips, Jannicke Mikkelse, commander Chun Wang and Rabea Rogge.
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SpaceX
“Wang aims to use the mission to highlight the crew’s explorational spirit, bring a sense of wonder and curiosity to the larger public and highlight how technology can help push the boundaries of exploration of Earth and through the mission’s research,” SpaceX said on its website.
Wang’s crewmates are Norwegian cinematographer Jannicke Mikkelsen, Australian adventurer Eric Philips and Rabea Rogge, a German robotics researcher. All four have an interest in extreme polar environments and plan to carry out related research and photography from orbit.
The mission, known as “Fram2” in honor of a Norwegian ship used to explore both the Arctic and Antarctic regions, will last three to five days and fly at altitudes between about 265 and 280 miles.
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“This looks like a cool & well thought out mission. I wish the @framonauts the best on this epic exploration adventure!” tweeted Jared Isaacman, the billionaire philanthropist who charted the first private SpaceX mission — Inspiration4 — and who plans to blast off on a second flight — Polaris Dawn — later this month.
The flights “showcase what commercial missions can achieve thanks to @SpaceX’s reusability and NASA’s vision with the commercial crew program,” Isaacman said. “All just small steps towards unlocking the last great frontier.”
This looks like a cool & well thought out mission. I wish the @framonauts the best on this epic exploration adventure!
Polaris Program, Inspiration4, Axiom, & now Fram2 showcase what commercial missions can achieve thanks to @SpaceX‘s reusability and NASA’s vision with the… https://t.co/t0bUWgXesW
Like the Inspiration4 mission before them, Wang and his crewmates will fly in a Crew Dragon equipped with a transparent cupola giving them a picture-window view of Earth below and deep space beyond.
No astronauts or cosmonauts have ever viewed Earth from the vantage point of a polar orbit, one tilted, or inclined, 90 degrees to the equator. Such orbits are favored by spy satellites, weather stations and commercial photo-reconnaissance satellites because they fly over the entire planet as it rotates beneath them.
The high-inclination record for piloted flight was set in the early 1960s by Soviet Vostok spacecraft launched into orbits inclined 65 degrees. The U.S. record was set by a space shuttle mission launched in 1990 that carried out a classified military mission in an orbit tilted 62 degrees with respect to the equator.
The International Space Station never flies beyond 51.6 degrees north and south latitude. NASA planned to launch a space shuttle on a classified military mission around the poles in 1986, but the flight was canceled in the wake of the Challenger disaster.
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“The North and South Poles are invisible to astronauts on the International Space Station, as well as to all previous human spaceflight missions except for the Apollo lunar missions but only from far away,” the Fram2 website says. “This new flight trajectory will unlock new possibilities for human spaceflight.”
SpaceX has launched 13 piloted missions carrying 50 astronauts, cosmonauts and private citizens to orbit in nine NASA flights to the space station, three commercial visits to the lab and the Inspiration4 mission chartered by Isaacman.
Isaacman and three crewmates plan to blast off Aug. 26 on another fully commercial flight, this one featuring the first civilian spacewalks. NASA plans to launch its next Crew Dragon flight to the space station around Sept. 24.
Bill Harwood has been covering the U.S. space program full-time since 1984, first as Cape Canaveral bureau chief for United Press International and now as a consultant for CBS News.
Today we’re launching a totally new, totally different app. Meet Orion.
Orion is a small, fun app that helps you use your iPad as an external HDMI display for any camera, video game console, or even VHS. Just plug in one of the bajillion inexpensive adapters, and Orion handles the rest.
But wait — we’re a camera company. Why an HDMI monitor?
We built this to scratch a few itches. First, in professional cinematography, it’s common to connect an external screen to your camera to get a better view of the action. Orion not only gives you a bigger screen, but you can even share screenshots with your crew with a couple of taps.
We also built this for… pure fun. When traveling with a Nintendo Switch, it’s a delight to play games on a bigger screen, especially alongside friends.
Orion goes a step beyond display. By default, inputs could look fuzzy on an iPad’s retina display. (Why? The Switch runs a modest 1080p resolution, and even if it ran at a higher resolution, most adapters on the market can only run 60 frames per second at 1080P.)
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Orion sharpens those low resolution inputs with an AI powered upscaler!
Another perk is control over the brightness of the image beyond the iPad’s screen brightness. If you’re trying to view video in daylight, crank up brightness to HDR range for extra help. If you’re on a late-night flight and don’t want to bother anyone around you, make things darker than the iPad’s darkest.
OK, I hear you ask, but how much does all of this cost? A camera monitor is hundreds of dollars. Well, Orion is free. Yep, free.
If you want to support the app, get Orion Pro: It packs AI upscaling, CRT emulation for retro games, and image adjustments (and whatever else we cook up). It’s a one-time upgrade for $5. It unlocks everything. No subscriptions.
As for those adapters, we found plenty available for under $20. Now it’s easy to get confused and accidentally buy, say, a USB-C hub with video output, which can’t capture anything. (Ask me how I know.) That’s why we personally tested the top ten adapters on Amazon and made a helpful buying guide with our recommendations and some other accessories, too.
The Story of Orion
This summer, Apple announced a set of awesome new features coming to iOS 17, and one of them was external-webcam support on iPad. After digging into the feature for our flagship app, Halide, we weren’t satisfied with the results in a camera app.
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However, we did discover that a ton of companies sell tiny, inexpensive adapters that convert HDMI signals into webcams. “What if you could use an iPad as a portable screen?” Hmm! Intriguing. We had an idea, and we got to work.
We wrote the first line of code on August 6th, we’re shipping September 20th — 45 days later.
We’re launching at the start of new iPhone season, so we’re already super busy and shifting our focus to our flagship iPhone photography app, Halide. Orion won’t distract us from that, because we’re calling it a b-side.
B-sides are small fun, small, and focused projects. Apps like Halide needs major work every year to keep up with new hardware, but we expect Orion will be “done” after a release or two. We’ll keep maintaining it so it doesn’t break, but we won’t revolve our lives around it. It’s a fun utility, and that’s why we’re only asking for a few bucks.
Beyond being fun to build and design, apps like Orion let us experiment with new developer tools earlier than in our flagship apps. In a mature app used by lots of people, it’s a good idea to wait a year or two before adopting a cutting edge technology; while Apple launched SwiftUI in 2019, but we waited until 2021 to add it to Halide. SwiftUI has been a huge win for certain types of problems— and we couldn’t have built Orion so quickly without it— but by waiting two years before adding SwiftUI it to Halide, we had to play a lot of catchup in 2021.
So apps like Orion allow us to scratch our own itch, which is how we got into building apps in the first place, and also help us keep up with where iOS is heading.
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The Orion Video System Design
You might notice something about the styling of Orion — it’s very stylized in a… retro sort of way.
When we set off to design the app, we really wanted it to be fun. Starting with the basic idea—a portable screen—we thought of the era where televisions and video were still exciting, fresh technology. The techno-utopia of the early 1980s came to mind. We find this a delightful aesthetic.
Pastels, purples and pinks. Detailed technical illustrations and bright colors. Futuristic logos. Type that tracked far too tightly thanks to the invention of the photo-typesetter. And of course, the invention of bitmap typefaces and on-screen user interfaces and icons.
We didn’t want to just lean into the clichés—there are enough vaporwave sunsets with Deloreans out there that try to seem ’80s’— so went and developed a visual language that is based on the electronics brochures and VCR interfaces of bygone days that conveys ‘modern’ in a way only the 1980s visual vernacular can.
In Halide, we did everything we could to make the app feel as tactile as a real camera. Great cameras are wonderfully tactile — every knob and switch has a weighted, deliberate feel and click to it.
In Orion, we wanted to give you the joy of your own ‘video system’. That meant starting from the beginning: you open the box to unpack it. Because, well, why not.
Instructions follow, so you can get started quickly.
And when not actively in use, you return to a glowing, slightly distorted nostalgic place of on-screen menus, where our custom-made pixel font called Radiant steals the show.
If it wasn’t obvious, we had a lot of fun doing this. And that’s what really mattered to us: if anything, Orion was a project to collaborate with friends on something fun and different.
Thank you
We want to build things with craft, fun and delight. To showcase that apps are an art form, and have no business being boring. We hope you enjoy the result — we know that we loved building it for you. Thanks to you, we get to do what we love.
Orion was a collaboration with friends. Some of the incredible design and typography on display (and our two custom typefaces) are the work of Jelmar Geertsma. Orion was co-engineered with Anton Heestand. The opening music (yes, opening music) is by Cabel Sasser. Extra thanks go to Louie Mantia for bézier wrangling and our families — especially Margo — for supporting us in doing what we love. If you are still reading here, please consider leaving us a review on our apps — it goes a very long way.
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