May 2020 Summaries

In a recent Accelerate online series episode, Patrick McFadin interviewed early adopters of deploying Cassandra on top of Kubernetes in production. A Special Interest Group (SIG) is working on a common Cassandra Kubernetes operator, with a draft specification available on the Apache Cassandra Wiki site. Anant has highlighted interesting posts from cassandra.link. DataStax continues its popular Cassandra Developer Workshop series and encourages feedback at [email protected] or @DataStaxDevs.

DataStax has announced the general availability (GA) of Astra, a cloud-native database-as-a-service (DBaaS) built on Apache Cassandra™. This service allows users to leverage all features and power of Cassandra as-a-service. In partnership with Knowi, an unified analytics platform, Astra is now supported as a new data source. Knowi supports data sources across any infrastructure and can dynamically blend data to create a new, super dataset for analysis. Through Knowi's intelligent analytics platform, Astra is available as another data source that can be established alongside other Cassandra or database deployments. The platform provides query language generators, smart query editors, Cloud9QL for data manipulation and aggregation, AI functionality with built-in machine learning algorithms, and natural language processing capabilities to make it easy for users to visualize their Cassandra data.

The text discusses the growing trend of deploying Apache Cassandra on Kubernetes in production, as evidenced by interviews with early adopters conducted by Patrick McFadin. A Special Interest Group (SIG) is working on a common Cassandra Kubernetes operator, and its draft specification can be found on the Apache Cassandra Wiki site. Anant has highlighted interesting posts from cassandra.link, and DataStax continues their popular Cassandra Developer Workshop series. The text also invites feedback and suggestions for future topics or projects to explore.

DataStax has released DataStax Desktop 2.0.0, providing a new, click-button guided experience for users to explore Apache Cassandra on their local machines. The tool includes tutorials on the Cassandra Query Language (CQL) and allows users to try out DataStax Enterprise, OpsCenter, or Studio. It also offers an embedded development environment with example projects against a live instance of Cassandra. With this release, users can quickly get started with a sample dataset of Netflix shows and learn about reading, writing, updating, and deleting data in keyspaces and tables. DataStax Desktop is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux, requiring Docker installation.

In the DataStax Accelerate: A NoSQL Original Series, experts discuss how organizations can adapt to a cloud-first world during times of crisis. The panel explores strategies for increasing productivity when building data-rich applications at scale in the cloud and highlights how DataStax Astra is uniquely positioned to help development teams.

The Metric Collector for Apache Cassandra (MCAC) is an open-source project by DataStax that aims to solve the problem of visualizing and obtaining a unified view of metrics in Apache Cassandra clusters. It provides a drop-in solution for monitoring Apache Cassandra, built on the widely used collectd agent. The MCAC efficiently exports hundreds of thousands of series per node with little impact on C* performance and works well with prometheus out of the box. Additionally, it gathers OS-level metrics like context switches and disk/network performance, as well as creating a historical log of metric and non-metric diagnostic events related to activity on the node. Pre-built Grafana dashboards are included for visualizing these metrics.

Apache Cassandra's advanced analytics capabilities, previously exclusive to DataStax Enterprise users, are now available for all Cassandra users with the release of Spark Cassandra Connector (SCC) 2.5. This version includes a new Java driver, support for DataStax Astra, and better container orchestration platform support. The new SCC is based on the Java driver 4.x, which provides improved performance, stability, extensibility, ease of use, and compatibility with both Cassandra and DSE. Additionally, users can now configure the driver using a configuration file, access column metadata via Dataframe APIs, optimize dataframes joining, and more.

Accelerate: A NoSQL Original Series features Chet Kapoor's talk on digital transformation, emphasizing that it is not a project or initiative but a continuous state of being. The next stage of this transformation involves becoming data-driven enterprises, which use data to create innovative business models and have data embedded in their cultures. DataStax CEO Chet Kapoor highlights the importance of weighing business and technology challenges and opportunities when transforming into a data-driven enterprise. Key considerations include clear data collection strategies, addressing operational challenges such as legacy processes and organizational silos, and ensuring employees develop new skills to adapt to the digital age. On the technology side, factors like scale, open source community involvement, and choosing cloud-native platforms are crucial for success. DataStax Astra, a cloud-native hybrid database-as-a-service powered by Kubernetes and Cassandra, simplifies data management and supports the development of powerful data-driven applications in the cloud.

Astra is a cloud-native database built on Apache Cassandra® that offers an easy setup process with no credit card required. Users can create a fully compatible database in minutes by registering for an account and following the prompts to specify region, database name, Keyspace name, and credentials. The free tier provides two regions while the C10 tier has more options. Once launched, users receive an email confirmation and can start exploring Astra's features. Feedback and suggestions are welcome, and users are encouraged to attend online learning sessions for further guidance.

DataStax Astra aims to make Apache Cassandra™ cloud-native by leveraging Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, and native control and management planes. The platform is built on the learnings from open-source Kubernetes operators for Cassandra and contributes back to the community with projects such as a Kubernetes operator, a management sidecar, a metrics collector, a configuration builder, and a NoSQL testing system. Astra focuses on four areas of work needed to run a cloud-native service with Apache Cassandra 3.11: gateway, operations, management, and deployment. It uses Envoy for routing Cassandra binary port requests, automates cluster operations with Cass Operator and Management API for Apache Cassandra (MAAC), provides metrics collection with Metrics Collector for Apache Cassandra (MCAC), and manages the operational characteristics of the cluster through cass-config-builder and NoSQLBench. The goal is to build a world-class cloud-native service for Apache Cassandra, making it the best open-source, scale-out, cloud-native database in the world.

Accelerate: A NoSQL Original Series is a content-packed show that explores how users and leading global enterprises are succeeding with NoSQL and Apache Cassandra™ in the new decade of open-source, scale-out, and cloud-native data. The series premiere on May 12 features four episodes discussing leadership visions for data-driven enterprises, managing the data firehose, retail modernization, and the potential of Cassandra as a data control plane for Kubernetes.

DataStax product leaders Denise Gosnell and Matthias Broecheler will be hosting a webinar on May 19 at 11 am PT to discuss graph databases and common mistakes to avoid. The pair have also co-authored "The Practitioner's Guide to Graph Data: Applying Graph Thinking and Graph Technologies to Solve Complex Problems," which is available for a free preview (Ch 3-5) and can be accessed by signing up for a 30-day free trial of O'Reilly online learning. The book aims to help engineers, data scientists, and data analytics professionals use graph technology to solve complex problems.