March 2022 Summaries

Data discovery is becoming increasingly challenging due to the vast amount of data collected through various systems. Companies often struggle with organizing this data and identifying its value. Shinji Kim, founder and CEO of Select Star, has addressed these issues by creating a platform that centralizes query engines for easier management of distributed data. Select Star helps organizations eliminate data discovery problems by gathering and controlling data, making it accessible when needed. The platform is essential in today's world where companies need reliable data cataloging systems to improve their processes. Before founding Select Star, Kim worked as a software engineer, data scientist, and project manager in several organizations, gaining valuable insights into the challenges of finding data.

Temporal.io is an open-source microservice orchestration platform that assists in tracking workflows in application development. It provides a plug-and-play persistence layer compatible with Postgres, MySQL, CockroachDB and Apache Cassandra. In this post, we show how to connect Temporal with Astra DB, a multi-cloud, serverless database-as-a-service (DBaaS), to easily manage workflows at scale using DataStax CQL-proxy. The process involves creating an Astra account and gathering credentials, setting up keyspaces in Astra, migrating schemas with Temporal's cql-proxy, configuring the persistence layer in Temporal, and testing connections and sample projects. This combination of Temporal and Astra DB provides a powerful microservice orchestration platform backed by Apache Cassandra without operational complexity.

Change Data Capture (CDC) is a solution that addresses the challenges of real-time applications by moving the responsibility of publishing change events from individual applications to the database serving the application. Traditional approaches have struggled with scaling and overhead, but CDC has emerged as a popular approach for eliminating these issues. Astra DB, an infinitely scalable, leaderless, distributed architecture like Apache Cassandra, now offers CDC for Astra DB powered by Astra Streaming, a multi-cloud streaming service built on Apache Pulsar. This enables organizations to create real-time data pipelines and accelerate the development of use cases important to data-driven enterprises.

The text discusses the advantages of near real-time application development and how Kubernetes can help achieve this. It highlights that users expect applications to react quickly, and developers need tools that do the same. Cloud-native developers are used to getting what they need when they need it, which is why they prefer working with Kubernetes. The text also explains how Kubernetes allows for continuous refinement of application infrastructure during development. It emphasizes the importance of data services in modern cloud applications and how Kubernetes can help manage them. Finally, it encourages developers to embrace new technologies like K8ssandra and Stargate to accelerate their application development process.

Temporal.io is an open-source microservices platform that simplifies managing long-running workflows. Its quick start installation allows users to easily integrate it with their personal workflows. Temporal supports different configurations using various databases and dependencies, including Apache Cassandra and DataStax Astra DB. The latter provides a managed, cloud-native database backing the Temporal platform, offering high performance and reliability for heavy workloads. Workflow orchestration is crucial in managing long-running tasks that are sometimes referred to as reentrant processes. Temporal is an open-source, distributed, and scalable workflow orchestration engine capable of running millions of workflows. It abstracts the complexity of a distributed system and supports Cassandra, MySQL, and PostgreSQL schemas for its server's database. Combining Temporal with Astra DB offers all the benefits of Cassandra with the simplicity of a managed cloud service (DBaaS), reducing deployment time from weeks to minutes.

Patricia Boswell, Staff Technical Writer at Google since 2004, has been instrumental in supporting content creators across the organization. Her journey into tech writing began with her study of English literature and early adoption of personal computers. She emphasizes storytelling as a means to facilitate better communication and collaboration in product development. Boswell sees tech writers as non-sales sellers who find the middle ground that will appeal to developers by bringing out the story behind every product. She encourages everyone in tech to make storytelling a part of their skill set because with it, collaboration on any kind of product becomes easier and more productive.

The pace of change in technology projects can be challenging to manage, with too much or too little alteration potentially causing issues. Open source projects are often evaluated based on their rate of progress, and this is true for Apache CassandraⓇ as well. After periods of rapid change and slower progress, the project has now found a good equilibrium. The focus has shifted from major API and functionality changes to features that improve ease of use and developer productivity. Additionally, the Cassandra community has seen revitalization through processes like the Cassandra Enhancement Proposal (CEP) and projects such as Cassandra Reaper and Cassandra Medusa. K8ssandra is an integrated stack for running Cassandra on Kubernetes, combining various tools into one package. The project now recognizes committers with diverse skill sets, including documentation and user support.

Elena Samuylova's company, Evidently AI, aims to solve the problem of unreliable data by building tools for analyzing and monitoring machine learning (ML) models. These open-source tools are designed for both experts and casual users. Evidently AI has joined startup accelerator Y Combinator to tackle this design challenge. The company focuses on addressing issues like drift, which refers to the degradation in a model's predictive power. Samuylova expects that in just a few years, dashboards for ML processes will be the standard and hopes that this will change the way ML models are monitored and tested in production.

Many enterprises are turning to open source NoSQL Apache Cassandra® as their globally distributed database for handling massive amounts of complex data in real-time. However, operational overhead can be a challenge with managing and maintaining Cassandra. Astra DB is a cloud database built on Cassandra that offers a serverless, pay-as-you-go managed service, eliminating the pain associated with infrastructure setup, installation, configuration, security, operation, and scaling. It provides turnkey security, flexibility for both schemaless JSON documents and schema-first approaches, continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) support, true auto scaling, and compatibility across cloud providers. Astra DB is a preferred choice of developers working for leading organizations like Venmo, Barracuda, Priceline, and more. It offers $300/year in free credit with the most generous free tier of any DBaaS.