November 2021 Summaries

Yesterday's data architecture is no longer sufficient for today's business requirements. To address this issue, many enterprises are turning to modern streaming platforms like Apache Pulsar. However, legacy message brokers such as RabbitMQ struggle to keep up with the scale and performance demands of current technology solutions. DataStax has introduced Starlight for RabbitMQ, an open-source compatibility layer that enables wire-level compatibility with RabbitMQ API while leveraging Pulsar's incredible performance and horizontal scalability. This solution allows organizations to modernize their RabbitMQ infrastructure without rewriting existing applications. Key benefits include improved data infrastructure, reduced costs, and simplified operations. Starlight for RabbitMQ is included in DataStax's Luna Streaming Enterprise support for Apache Pulsar and its source code is available on GitHub under the Apache Software License v2.

Apache Pulsar is a cloud-native, distributed messaging and event streaming platform developed at Yahoo in 2013 and open-sourced in 2016 with the Apache Software Foundation. It has been adopted by numerous companies such as Yahoo! Japan, Tencent, Comcast, and Overstock for efficiently moving data. Pulsar is a unified messaging and streaming platform that can handle pub-sub, queueing, streaming, and stream processing needs in one place. Its advantages over competing solutions like Apache Kafka include removing the pain and operational costs of deploying, managing, maintaining, and integrating several systems with similar functions. Pulsar supports publish-subscribe messaging (pub-sub), queueing, streaming, and stream processing use cases. It is used by modern enterprises for real-time analytics, fraud detection, tracking financial trades, website engagement evaluation, and more.

This year's AWS re:Invent 2021 highlights the upcoming digital transformation trends across various industries, with DataStax playing a significant role as a Gold Technology sponsor. The company showcases three solutions that leverage Apache Cassandra and are ideal for deployment on AWS. These include Astra DB, a multi-cloud, serverless DBaaS; Apache Cassandra 4.0 on EKS Anywhere with K8ssandra, offering improved performance and reliability; and Astra Streaming, a real-time application platform built on Apache Pulsar. DataStax aims to help enterprises reduce complexity and database sprawl by deploying and consolidating NoSQL workloads on a multi-modal database with infinite scalability and millisecond response time.

Developers are increasingly adopting microservices and NoSQL databases like Apache Cassandra due to benefits such as faster time-to-market, lower costs, better performance, less downtime, and easy scalability. However, creating cloud-native applications can be challenging because microservices are often written in different languages, database drivers require maintenance, and familiar HTTP APIs may lack the needed performance. To address these issues, DataStax has introduced a gRPC API for Apache Cassandra, which is 100% open source and already includes client libraries for Go, Rust, Node.js, and Java. The gRPC API is part of Stargate, an open-source project that serves as a data API gateway to make it easier to work with data in Cassandra. By leveraging the high-performance, multilingual support provided by gRPC, developers can create applications using polyglot microservices and exchange data between these services and Cassandra more efficiently.

Season 3 of "Inspired Execution" features interviews with leaders from various companies such as Asana, Adobe, Persistent Systems, and Google Cloud. The conversations cover a range of topics including maximizing productivity, empathy in the workplace, customer-centricity, and self-betterment. Notable guests include Alex Hood, CPO at Asana; Anand Deshpande and Sandeep Kalra, Founder and CEO respectively of Persistent Systems; Abhay Parasnis, CTO and CPO at Adobe; and Aashima Gupta, Global Director of Healthcare Solutions at Google Cloud. The latest episode features Jim Baum discussing team building, execution mistakes, and turning weaknesses into strengths.

The text discusses the Cassandra data modeling methodology, which is crucial for creating efficient and sound data models for Apache Cassandra® and DataStax Astra DB. This methodology is based on four objectives, four models, and two transitions, along with specific techniques and methods. It also provides a collection of real-life domain examples to help users understand the process better. The text highlights that data modeling in Cassandra, Astra DB, and K8ssandra are practically identical, while Stargate APIs can have varying impacts on data modeling.

Apache Cassandra, an open-source NoSQL distributed database, has introduced a new change data capture (CDC) solution to enhance real-time data connectivity for businesses. DataStax CDC for Cassandra, powered by Apache Pulsar, allows users to capture database changes as a stream of events and expose them to any downstream systems and clients. This feature deduplicates changes observed at the replica level and exposes a "clean" set of changed rows on a Pulsar topic, which can then be piped to various parts of an enterprise ecosystem. The CDC for Cassandra is compatible with DataStax Enterprise version 6.8.16 and open source Cassandra versions 4.0.x and 3.11.x.

In this post, a JavaScript newbie shares their journey to understanding async and await by creating a live web app that times how long it takes to make asynchronous API calls between two cloud-based services. The author set up timing tests using asynchronous API calls and faced some hiccups along the way. They discovered that round numbers were not updating with each subsequent series of tests, which led them to use the async/await pattern in JavaScript. By making the code pause after the test, they could correctly calculate the runtime for each set of asynchronous API calls. The author also used Netlify's functions feature and Promise.all() to make simultaneous calls to the API.

IoTWorld Silicon Valley is taking place on November 3-4, where DataStax will be sponsoring booth IOT120. The event focuses on the rapid growth of connected devices and the massive amounts of data they generate. IoT Analytics reports that by the end of 2021, there will be 12.3 billion active endpoints globally, with over 2 billion connected via cellular networks due to increasing 5G penetration. This presents a challenge for organizations in terms of capturing and storing data effectively. Traditional relational databases are insufficient for this task, necessitating the adoption of multi-cloud or hybrid cloud approaches. DataStax offers open source solutions for handling massive data in hybrid and multi-cloud environments, as well as highly scalable event streaming to keep up with data generated by large fleets of 5G IoT devices.