October 2022 Summaries

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America took place in Detroit last week, featuring a variety of side events and discussions on topics such as data workloads, analytics, and security. The adoption of analytic workloads running in Kubernetes is increasing, with organizations reporting satisfaction with the results. Projects like KubeSlice and SigStore were highlighted for their potential to enhance multi-cluster management and code signing across open source projects, respectively. With the growth of cloud native technology, standalone events focusing on specific topics such as security and data workloads are expected to emerge in the future.

Stargate v2 is a data API gateway that brings Apache Cassandra to the forefront of driverless cloud-native databases alongside other technologies like etcd, ClickHouse, PrestoDB, and Apache Pinot. Real-time applications on the cloud are moving away from native drivers for app-to-data connections due to the increasing obscurity of code in modern computing environments. DataStax's research shows that 71% of organizations can directly link revenue growth to the use of real-time data, with those making it a strategic focus being 2.3X more likely to experience a transformative impact on revenue. Stargate v2 elevates gRPC to native-driver-level performance while exposing Apache Cassandra over other web APIs and a JSON Document interface, simplifying data access and management in cloud-native systems. The new architecture of Stargate v2 is modular, improving performance and operational control by using dedicated node types for data storage, query coordination, and API services. This allows independent deployment and scalability of these nodes, enabling operations teams to locate workloads on optimal hardware or scale only the bottlenecked components.

Hornet Networks, the world's leading queer tech company, provides a digital home for over 35 million people worldwide to safely connect with each other. The company uses DataStax Luna and now DataStax Astra DB to support its mission of empowering queer people and cultivating meaningful relationships within the community. With DataStax Astra DB's automatic scaling, pay-as-you-go pricing, and efficient data compaction, Hornet has been able to save costs and focus on expanding its user base across Europe and the United States. The company also launched SPACES, a new social networking app that complements its existing dating app, with Astra DB's help.

DataStax is hosting in-person Cassandra Day events in Santa Clara, Bellevue, and Houston on November 10th, featuring discussions about Apache Cassandra and opportunities to network with like-minded professionals. The meetups aim to provide value for individuals at all levels of experience with Cassandra, including hands-on workshops, presentations from industry experts, and a deeper dive into the latest developments in the Cassandra project. Intel is co-sponsoring these events, showcasing their commitment to open source projects and the Cassandra community. Attendees will also receive two movie tickets and a popcorn voucher as a token of appreciation for their participation.

Sagnik Nandy, CTO at Okta and former Google VP of Engineering, shares his career journey marked by "gratitude" for working with smart people on impactful technologies. He emphasizes finding satisfaction in solving hard problems while collaborating with exceptional individuals. Throughout his time at Google and now at Okta, Sagnik has learned the importance of balancing sustainable growth planning with swift problem-solving to meet customer needs.

DataStax has released an open-source Zero Downtime Migration (ZDM) suite for Apache Cassandra® to simplify the process of migrating production databases. The ZDM suite aims to reduce downtime and risks associated with structured data migrations, offering a proven technology that has successfully migrated large, production workloads. It enables users to easily migrate applications between various Cassandra cluster types and deployment scenarios, including Apache Cassandra, DataStax Enterprise (DSE), DataStax Astra DB in the cloud of choice, or any other CQL-compatible datastores. The primary component of ZDM is the ZDM Proxy, a fully open-source and lightweight proxy that resides between the application and the source cluster. It ensures write consistency on both clusters and can be configured with a minimum of three nodes for high availability.

Astra Streaming, built on Apache Pulsar™, is a multi-cloud streaming-as-a-service platform that simplifies operations and management of connectors. It supports replicating messages across different regions and cloud providers with ease. The platform also offers experimental connectors for various use cases and provides full documentation reference for managing connectors using pulsar-admin and curl. Astra Streaming allows Prometheus to scrape metrics from each tenant, enabling real-time data usage for decision-making within applications. It supports schema evolution and helps build high-performance event-driven applications. The platform also offers a Java client for hands-on experience with message producers and consumers.

In part 2 of the "AI as an API" series, learn how to configure a virtual machine and deploy a machine learning REST API using Linode, Docker, cryptography, and DataStax Astra DB. The tutorial guides you through setting up a virtual machine, running the model on both local and virtual environments, installing Docker, creating a Dockerfile, adding environment variables, activating the virtual machine, implementing pypyr pipelines, and connecting to an Astra DB. This process helps scale your machine learning model for production and automates deployment. The tutorial is taught by Justin Mitchel of Coding for Entrepreneurs and sponsored by DataStax.

DataStax introduces a private preview of a new feature for its Astra DB cloud database, allowing developers to easily build applications using Ethereum data feeds. This enhancement will benefit Web3 app creators by enabling rapid blockchain queries without interacting with an RPC node. The private preview is exclusive to existing Astra DB users and interested parties can learn more and sign up by contacting [email protected].

Raja Rajamannar, Mastercard's CMO, shares his insights on marketing in the Inspired Execution podcast. He believes that a company's true differentiation comes from marketing, which combines data, technology, and creativity to deliver unique experiences. To achieve this, companies need a balanced team of marketers who excel in both creative thinking and quantitative skills. Sound plays an important role in marketing, with familiar jingles and melodies helping consumers associate brands with specific emotions. Raja shares how Mastercard created an album called Priceless to enhance its brand identity through music. He suggests that companies should consider "sonic branding" as part of their strategy due to the growing impact of audio marketing on consumers worldwide.