Managed Cassandra on AWS, Our Take

Amazon's new Managed Cassandra Service (MCS) on AWS has sparked interest in the tech community, particularly among those familiar with NoSQL databases like ScyllaDB and DynamoDB. MCS serves as a hybrid, combining the front end of Apache Cassandra with a back end powered by DynamoDB, offering a serverless experience but with certain limitations, such as lack of multi-region support and restricted consistency levels. Despite its potential benefits, including integration with AWS IAM and a convenient serverless setup, MCS faces critiques for its cost and functional constraints, making it more suitable for specific use cases, such as pure Cassandra migrations. The service has been described as a 'chimera'—part Cassandra, part Dynamo—and while AWS promises contributions to the open-source community, skepticism remains about whether these will extend beyond proprietary interests. ScyllaDB, a competitor, views the situation as an opportunity to learn and improve its cloud offering, ScyllaDB Cloud, which boasts significant price and performance advantages over other NoSQL databases.