January 2023 Summaries

Apache Pulsar is a multi-tenant, high-performance messaging and streaming platform designed to manage billions of events in real-time. It supports multiple clusters in a Pulsar instance, built-in geo-replication of messages across clusters, low latency transmission, and scales to over a million topics. In 2022, the Pulsar community made significant progress with more than 1600 commits across five releases. The ecosystem is vibrant and includes projects like Starlight, which provides wire-level compatibility with traditional messaging APIs, enabling existing applications to take advantage of Pulsar's performance and scalability without requiring them to be rewritten. Apache Pulsar Functions abstract away the details normally handed by dedicated stream processing engines, allowing for data transformations, dynamic routing, data enrichment, analytics, and more. DataStax also improved the Pulsar Functions framework with DataStax Pulsar Transformations that allow it to run advanced data manipulation without writing code. CDC for Astra DB, built on both Astra's modular, serverless foundation, and Astra Streaming, enables real-time applications to subscribe to change events using client libraries in Java, Golang, Python, or Node.js.

The upcoming Cassandra Summit, hosted by the Linux Foundation on March 13-14, 2023 (with an optional training day on March 12) at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center in California, offers a range of sessions tailored to different personas. Key must-see sessions include Apache Cassandra for Developers, The What and Why of Cassandra data modeling at Scale, Cassandra on ACID: This changes everything, Embracing Multi-Cloud Cassandra at Walmart, SmartThings First 8 Years With Cassandra, Apache Cassandra for Architects and Data Engineers, Journey for Modernizing Traditional Banking with Online Data Platform, and Extracting Change Data Capture Events from Cassandra using Flink. The event also provides opportunities to network with other engineers in the community through its "hallway track." Attendees can use code CS23DS20 for an additional 20% off their pass during early registration.

K2View is a company that helps businesses democratize data access by providing a real-time, 360-degree view of any business entity such as customers, products, work orders, suppliers, or credit cards. Their Data Product Platform manages these "data products" as secure micro-databases, populated in real-time by multiple siloed systems across an enterprise and instantly accessible to authorized data consumers. K2View's journey began with migration use cases, trying to solve the problem of data migration with no downtime. They chose DataStax Astra DB for its multi-cloud and elastic deployment model with a consumption-based structure, which provides flexibility in how they deploy their platform and helps them offer consumption-based billing to customers. K2View is seeing great scalability and performance with Astra DB, as well as the ability to meet growing customer expectations with very flexible technologies.

Real-time data is becoming increasingly important in today's digital landscape, with applications ranging from location-based services to banking and retail. Open source projects like Apache Cassandra and Apache Pulsar are leading the delivery of real-time data at cloud scale for developers. These technologies have addressed difficulties faced by developers in adopting real-time data, such as cache invalidation and naming things. However, shifting from a traditional "app-to-database-first" mindset to an "app-to-stream-first" approach requires significant collaboration between architects and developers, addressing technical, cultural, and organizational issues. Despite these challenges, leading digital services are built on open source technologies like Apache Cassandra, Stargate, and Apache Pulsar, with companies around the globe partnering with DataStax to accelerate their real-time data capabilities.

The first season of the Apache Cassandra Corner podcast featured interviews with members of the Cassandra community, revealing three key themes. Firstly, many individuals' careers have been shaped by their experience with Cassandra, leading to roles at large enterprises. Secondly, the community is known for its welcoming and helpful nature, often assisting newcomers in resolving issues. Lastly, most people start using Cassandra out of necessity due to scalability requirements, highlighting its versatility across various infrastructure platforms. The podcast's success has generated excitement for season two, which will focus on the upcoming Cassandra Summit and feature interviews with prominent speakers from the community.

This week, DataStax announced its expansion to unlock real-time AI at scale for all organizations. The company has identified that the best applications use AI by bringing ML to data in Apache Cassandra instead of moving data to traditional ML architectures. With the acquisition of Kaskada, DataStax aims to make real-time AI accessible for powering all applications. Additionally, DataStax launched a new brand look representing its commitment to open source technologies and empowering customers.

Kaskada has announced its joining with DataStax to deliver a powerful unified solution for real-time AI. The move comes after five years of focusing on expanding the reach of data science and machine learning, particularly in feature engineering and feature serving. With DataStax's unique connection to Apache Cassandra, which is used by more than 90% of Fortune 500 companies, Kaskada aims to leverage real-time data for a new generation of AI-powered applications. The combined efforts will help businesses make accurate and powerful decisions at the exact time they are needed, making real-time AI a reality for all enterprises.

DataStax has acquired Kaskada, a machine learning company that specializes in time-based event data processing. By combining Kaskada's technology with DataStax's product stack, they aim to provide an end-to-end solution for real-time artificial intelligence (AI). Many companies struggle to activate their real-time data and perform real-time AI due to slow data delivery through complicated environments. The acquisition of Kaskada will enable DataStax to deliver a simple solution that brings machine learning to data, unlocking new intelligent applications such as personalized content, real-time factory adjustments, and advanced cybersecurity. With the Kaskada acquisition, DataStax is committed to making real-time AI possible for everyone.

DataStax has introduced enhancements to its multi-region databases in Astra DB, providing additional consistency options (EACH_QUORUM and SERIAL) for ensuring data is immediately written to a majority of replicas across all configured regions. The SERIAL consistency model enables the use of Lightweight Transactions (LWTs) in multi-region deployments. These updates aim to provide powerful business continuity options, ultra-low latency experiences globally, and lower total cost of ownership than traditional multi-region deployment architectures.

SupPlant, a world leader in precision agriculture, uses AI-powered irrigation and real-time data to help farmers grow healthier plants with optimum water usage. The company's system gathers data from sensors placed on the plant trunk, fruit, and soil, collecting and transmitting measurements in real time. SupPlant has accumulated data covering thousands of growing seasons across every weather condition, which is processed in real-time to drive recommendations and irrigation commands. DataStax Astra DB serves as the primary data store for SupPlant's IoT data due to its support for simple and cost-effective business continuity. The company aims to help all 540 million farmers worldwide, including small farmers without sensors in their fields, by providing real-time insights that support proactive farming, irrigation planning, and crop success.