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Announcing the launch of “Cerebrata” in Public Preview

Gaurav Mantri

Jun 4, 2017

Category: General

It gives me immense pleasure to launch our latest product Cerebrata in public preview. In this blog post I will talk about what this product is, about its features and our future roadmap with this product.

What is Cerebrata?

Cerebrata is a cross-platform desktop tool for managing your Azure resources. Built using GitHub’s Electron & Facebook’s ReactJS frameworks, this tool will work on Windows, Mac & Linux.

Azure Services Supported

Next, let’s talk about the Azure Services you can manage using Cerebrata. As of today, you can manage 3 services using this tool – Azure Cosmos DB (DocumentDB), Azure Redis Cache and Azure Search. Support for more services will be added soon.

Now let’s talk about features of each of these services support in details.

Azure Cosmos DB

As of writing of this post, Cerebrata has full support for DocumentDB API of Cosmos DB. We will be adding other APIs (Tables, Graph, Mongo) real soon. When it comes to DocumentDB, using Cerrbrata you can:

  • Connect to one or more of your Azure Cosmos DB accounts. On Windows platform, you can also connect to DocumentDB emulator.
  • Manage DocumentDB databases in your Cosmos DB accounts. You can list, create and delete DocumentDB databases.
  • Manage collections in your DocumentDB databases. When it comes to managing collections
    • You can list, create, update and delete collections.
    • When creating collections, you can specify request throughput, configure partitioning strategy, configure indexing policies, and set default time-to-live (TTL) policy.
    • You can update request throughput on the fly. When updating request throughput, you can change Request Units/Seconds (RU/S) for that collection as well as enable/disable Request Units/Minute (RUPM).
    • You can update indexing policies of the collection on the fly.
    • You can change documents time-to-live (TTL) policy for that collection.
    • You can view collection statistics.
    • You can view collection’s system properties.
  • Manage users in your DocumentDB databases. You can list, create, update and delete users.
  • Manage documents in a collection. When it comes to managing documents
    • You can query for documents, create, update and delete documents.
    • When querying for documents in a partitioned collection, you can specify partition key attribute along with your query. Tool allows you to specify all kinds of partition key values (string, number, boolean, null). You can also execute queries that span across partitions.
    • You can save most frequently used queries in the application itself so that you don’t have to type them over and over again.
  • Manage document attachments. When it comes to managing document attachments
    • You can list, create, update and delete document attachments.
    • For creating attachments, you can either select a file from your local machine or specify the URL of a publicly available resource on the Internet.
  • Manage stored procedures in a collection. When it comes to managing stored procedures
    • You can list, create, update and delete stored procedures.
    • You can execute stored procedures using the tool itself.
    • You can even update stored procedures in a partitioned collection (not natively supported by DocumentDB API).
  • Manage triggers in a collection. When it comes to managing triggers
    • You can list, create, update and delete triggers.
    • You can even update triggers in a partitioned collection (not natively supported by DocumentDB API).
  • Manage user defined functions in a collection. When it comes to managing user defined functions
    • You can list, create, update and delete user defined functions.
    • You can even update user defined functions in a partitioned collection (not natively supported by DocumentDB API).

To learn more about Azure Cosmos DB features, Click here.

Azure Redis Cache

When it comes to managing your Azure Redis Cache accounts, using Cerebrata you can

  • Connect to one or more of your Azure Redis Cache accounts.
  • You can view the list of databases in your account.
  • You can manage keys in a database. When it comes to managing keys
    • You can create new keys in a database. All key types are supported.
    • You can search for keys in a database. Partial and wild-card searches are supported.
    • You can edit key values.
    • You can delete one or more keys from a database.
    • You can rename a key.
    • You can change a key’s expiry.
  • You can delete all keys in a database with a single click (FLUSHDB) command.
  • You can delete all keys from all databases with a single click (FLUSHALL) command.
  • You can view the list of clients connected to your Azure Redis Cache account. You can kill client connections from the tool itself.
  • You can view slow log entries. You can also clear slow log entries.
  • You can monitor the performance of your Azure Redis Cache account through interactive charts. We have included over 250 monitoring elements including % CPU utilization, % memory utilization etc.
  • We have also included a basic cache terminal using which you can directly execute Redis commands against your Redis Cache account.

To learn more about Azure Redis Cache features, Click here.

Azure Search Service

When it comes to managing your Azure Search Service accounts, using Cerebrata you can

  • Connect to one or more of your Azure Search Service accounts.
  • You can manage indexes in your account. When it comes to managing indexes
    • You can list, create, update or delete indexes.
    • You can manage index fields in an index. When creating an index field, you can specify index data type, attributes and analyzers.
    • You can manage index scoring profile. You can define scoring profile functions as well as weights.
    • You can manage CORS policies for an index.
    • You can manage “Char Filters” for an index.
    • You can manage “Token Filters” for an index.
    • You can manage “Tokenizers” for an index.
    • You can manage “Analyzers” for an index. You can create custom analyzers as well using this tool.
  • You can manage data sources in your account. When it comes to managing data sources
    • You can list, create, update or delete data sources.
    • Azure SQL, Azure Blob, Azure Table and DocumentDB type data sources are supported.
    • You can also specify data change detection and data deletion detection policies.
  • You can manage indexers in your account. When it comes to managing indexers
    • You can list, create, update or delete indexers.
    • You can schedule an indexer or run the indexer on demand from within the application.
    • You can check the status of an indexer.
    • You can reset an indexer.
    • You can disable/enable an indexer.
  • You can manage documents in an index. When it comes to managing documents
    • You can query for documents. Using this tool, you can define advanced queries as well.
    • You can create, update or delete documents.
    • You can search documents by keys.

To learn more about Azure Cognitive Search features, Click here.

As you can see we have been extremely thorough in supporting the Azure services we have included in the tool. I don’t think there’s one single tool which provides you all of these features for these services.

Pricing

Next obvious question that comes to mind is how Cerebrata will be priced. There has been some changes and I want to talk about those here.

First, Cerebrata is offered to you as a “Subscription” based product. There’s no license key that you will get. Instead you will purchase a subscription.

If you are an individual developer, we are offering you a flexibility of either getting a monthly personal subscription or an annual personal subscription. Not only these are very reasonably priced but also give an option of paying for the tool as long as you want to use it. You can cancel your subscription any time! No questions asked (though we will be sad pandas to see you go ).

From our experience selling other Cerebrata products, we found that licenses are purchased in bulk often by a manager for her/his team or by a reseller. We obviously want to support that. For such users, we are offering professional subscription. Again, not only these are very reasonably priced but also have the feature where a subscription can be transferred to another user in the team. Today that happens by raising a support request but eventually we will come up with an account management portal using which you will be able to manage your subscriptions without ever reaching out to support.

Another big advantage for you with subscription based approach is that you can now install and use Cerebrata on as many machines as you like (unlike Azure Management Studio where you can only use the software on 2 machines).

Learn more about our pricing.

Future Roadmap

We have been working on this product for last 8 – 9 months now and it has been in closed private beta for last 4 months or so with lots of users. We have been iterating and improving the product like crazy and what you see today is a result of feedback from our private beta users (we can’t thank them enough!).

But to be honest, we have just scratched the surface (or not even that). Azure has grown leaps and bounds and we intend to support management of all the major services in Cerebrata. Our intention is to bring the ease of managing your Azure resources to your desktop. Is it going to happen overnight? No! Will it happen? Yes, it will!!! We will need to your continued support and encouragement while we undertake this journey. We are hoping that you will be a part of this journey with us by providing us constant feedback – Good, bad, ugly; we can take all .

On our immediate roadmap after this is support for Azure Service Bus (work has already underway on that) and Azure Cosmos DB.

Azure Management Studio

Now that we have this new product, I am sure a lot of you will have a question or two about Azure Management Studio. Azure Management Studio is supported today and will be supported a long time to come. We do realize that a lot of users like you depend on Azure Management Studio for managing Azure Storage, Diagnostics and Subscriptions and it would be a grave mistake on our part to stop supporting that product. Our goal is to bring all the goodness available in Azure Management Studio into Cerebrata and till the time that happens, Azure Management Studio will be completely supported. However, I will be honest in saying that we will not be adding support for any new services in Azure Management Studio. So, if you want to see support for a new Azure Service, please send them to us by all means. We will be incorporating support for that in Cerebrata only.

I would be more than happy to answer any questions/concerns that you may have on Azure Management Studio. Please feel free to reach out to me directly. I can be reached at gmantri @ cerebrata.com. I will try my best to answer your queries and concerns.

Closing

All in all, I am quite excited about this development and what lies ahead of us. Needless to say, your support and encouragement is required for us to be successful in providing you with best Azure management tooling. I am quite hopeful that you will give Cerebrata a try and will make it the tool of your choice for managing your Azure resources.

Let me close by saying that providing you with best Azure tooling is our sole goal!

As always, if you have any comments or thoughts please do share with us. If you need to reach out to support at support @ cerebrata.com.

If you wish to experience Cerebreta, try our 15 days free trial.

Thanks for reading and have a great day!