This blog was originally published on GridGain’s website.

When MariaDB evaluated and acquired GridGain, we noticed something important: GridGain is not a platform used on the margins of an enterprise, instead it sits at the heart of systems that matter deeply to the business. Customers rely on it for payments, fraud prevention, risk management, customer 360, and other applications where ultra-low latency, scale, resilience, and uptime are essential.

That reality shapes our direction.

Our goal is to meet customers where they are, invest in the platform they depend on today, and simplify the path forward for the teams running mission-critical workloads in production.

Investing Where Customers Are: GridGain 8

A large share of GridGain customers continue to run GridGain 8 in production. These range from who’s who in finance to the world’s largest Telcos to a plethora of retail, and high-tech companies supporting real-world, high-value applications. For these teams, the priority is not novelty for its own sake. It is confidence: confidence in the platform, confidence in support, and confidence that the vendor behind it is investing in their future.

That is why MariaDB is increasing investment in GridGain 8.

We are treating GridGain 8 as a strategic platform, with continued innovation focused on the needs of production users. That includes stronger operational resilience, a smoother upgrade experience, and investment in capabilities that matter for modern data-intensive applications, including advanced Vector and AI capabilities and a dedicated Kubernetes Operator. It will also include a new upcoming release of GridGain 8 and a clear lifecycle policy (to be announced).

This approach reflects a simple principle: customers should not have to choose between stability and progress. They should have both, which is also why we are in fact continuing to invest heavily in the development of GridGain 9 – more on that at a future date.

In addition, we are in progress of moving GridGain offerings directly onto the MariaDB Cloud, providing our users with a scalable, unified cloud data solution. Initial offers are in active development, with a first Tech Preview anticipated in late summer.

Simplifying the Portfolio Around Enterprise Needs

Just as important as product investment is product clarity.

Over time, infrastructure portfolios can become more complex than customers need them to be. That complexity makes evaluation harder, procurement slower, and deployment decisions less clear. Enterprise buyers do not want a maze of packaging options. They want to know which offering fits their environment, what it includes, and whether it is designed for the operational demands they face.

That is why we are streamlining GridGain around two core offerings: Enterprise Edition and Ultimate Edition.

This is not simplification for its own sake. It is simplification around what matters most in production. Enterprise Edition and Ultimate Edition are designed to align more directly with the needs of organizations running critical workloads at scale, from uptime and observability to resilience, security, and support.

Apache Ignite remains the open-source foundation of the ecosystem. GridGain builds on that foundation with enterprise capabilities for customers whose deployments have moved beyond experimentation and into systems that must perform reliably every day.

Our new packaging is designed around these realities:

Figure 1 – GridGain Capabilities with streamlined packaging for our new customers

What GridGain Adds for Production Environments

Apache Ignite is indeed a powerful open-source distributed data platform. But once an Ignite-based application becomes central to revenue, customer experience, or real-time decisioning, teams need more than core distributed data capabilities. They need the security, tooling and operational reliability required to run with confidence in production.

That is where GridGain adds value.

GridGain extends Apache Ignite with capabilities that enterprises need when downtime is costly and operational risk is unacceptable. These include:

  • Rolling upgrades – Teams can deploy updates with far less disruption, reducing maintenance windows and helping support continuous availability.
  • Enterprise-Grade Security – Provide built-in security controls that meet enterprise and regulatory requirements.
  • Data Center Replication – Organizations can support geographic resilience, failover strategies, and distributed operations across regions and data centers.
  • Remote snapshots and heterogeneous restore – Backup and recovery become more robust, helping teams strengthen disaster recovery planning and reduce operational risk.
  • Control Center – Operators gain deeper visibility into cluster health, performance, and troubleshooting, helping them move from reactive issue resolution to more proactive management.

These are not edge capabilities. They define a platform that works in production and one that is ready to operate at enterprise scale.

Support That Matches the Workload

For customers running mission-critical systems, support is not an add-on. It is part of the product experience that brings them peace of mind. 

When something goes wrong in production, teams need timely access to experts, well-defined service levels, and confidence that the software they are running is maintained and supported to enterprise standards. They need more than community resources. They need accountability.

This is another area where MariaDB brings meaningful strength to GridGain.

MariaDB supports hundreds of enterprise customers running demanding data infrastructure, and we are bringing that same operational rigor to GridGain. That means GridGain support offerings designed for production environments, including certified and maintained releases, proactive security and maintenance practices, and access to the expertise required to help customers run distributed systems with confidence.

As GridGain becomes more tightly aligned with MariaDB’s support model, GridGain customers can expect an experience built for the realities of enterprise operations: responsiveness, expertise, and a support structure that reflects the importance of the systems they are running.

Figure 2 – GridGain Support offerings going forward

A More Focused Direction

At its core, this next chapter for GridGain is about focus.

It is about bringing innovation and stability to the platform version our customers rely on today. It is about simplifying the portfolio around Enterprise Edition and Ultimate Edition. It is about emphasizing the operational capabilities that matter most when distributed systems become business-critical. And it is about delivering a support experience that reflects the stakes of those workloads.

GridGain has always had strong technical foundations. With MariaDB’s backing, we now have the opportunity to sharpen the offering around those strengths and invest more deliberately in the areas enterprise customers value most.

For GridGain customers, that means a clearer path forward: continued investment in GridGain 8, a simpler and more focused portfolio, stronger enterprise support, and ongoing innovation in the capabilities that modern production environments require.

That is the direction we are building toward, and it is one designed around our customers and their priorities.