Cobli’s Drive From Cassandra to ScyllaDB

Cobli's blog post by Ivan Stoiev details the complex and risky process of migrating the company's main database from Cassandra to ScyllaDB, driven by the need for improved performance and cost efficiency. The post outlines Cobli's use case in vehicle fleet telematics, where high availability and write capacity are crucial due to the significant volume of IoT data generated by their fleet. ScyllaDB, marketed as a faster and cheaper alternative to Cassandra, was chosen for its high compatibility and performance advantages. Cobli opted for ScyllaDB's SaaS version, ScyllaDB Cloud, leveraging its integration with AWS and monitoring capabilities, despite some limitations in metrics and backup administration. The technical feasibility of ScyllaDB was assessed through functional and performance validation, revealing notable improvements in query latency and efficiency with less hardware. The migration process involved evaluating tools like dsbulk and scylla-migrator, with the latter showing superior data migration speeds, leading Cobli to proceed with the migration while preparing for further challenges such as downtime tracking.