Developer Newsletter: Why Tomorrow's Cassandra Deployments Will Be on Kubernetes

It seems we’ve crossed the line from people talking about deploying Cassandra on top of Kubernetes in production to actually doing it. Patrick McFadin (@PatrickMcFadin) interviewed several of these early adopters in this fascinating episode from the Accelerate online series.

There was so much goodness we released the original conversations on the Distributed Data Show (Spotify | SoundCloud | YouTube): 

• How does Sky UK stay grounded with Cassandra and Kubernetes | Episode 148 with Alan Gibson, Principal Software Engineer @ Sky UK. 
• What you need to know to deploy Cassandra in Kubernetes | Episode 149 with Christopher Bradford, Product Manager @ DataStax
• Is self-driving data infrastructure our future? | Episode 150 with Raghavendra Prabhu, Sr. Software Engineer @ Yelp

Speaking of a common Cassandra Kubernetes operator, there’s already a Special Interest Group (SIG) hard at work! Check out the draft specification on Apache Cassandra Wiki site. 

Community Highlights From cassandra.link

Our friends at Anant highlighted a few interesting posts that showed up on cassandra.link recently:

• Cassandra 4.0 Datacenter Security Enhancements - Anthony Grasso’s article describes how enterprises can better segment and secure data workloads.
• How to Deploy a Cassandra Cluster/Ring on Kubernetes + OpenEBS - With Cassandra + OpenEBS, avoid vendor lock-in with truly cloud-native storage on any Kubernetes distribution or vendor. Another testimony.
• CQL Data Modeler - Sebestian Estevez’s open-source tool for visualizing and creating Cassandra Stress tests is one of the best open secrets for folks new to Cassandra.

Notable Software Releases

• Cassandra 4.0 Alpha 4 - cqlsh now works on Python 3! There’s a rapidly shrinking number of Jira issues to close before we can cut a Beta release.
• DataStax Astra - ur Cassandra-as-a-service is GA. Don’t miss the free tier! Read what Sam Ramji had to say about why we open-sourced some of the internals.
• DataStax Java Driver v4.6 - this includes improvements for C* 4.0 compatibility and a new offset paging feature
• Spring Boot 2.3.0 and Spring Data Neumann - These releases feature an upgrade to the latest Cassandra Java driver version 4.x as well as support for C* 4.0 functionality.

Upcoming Events 

We’re continuing our popular Cassandra Developer Workshop series:

• 6/2/2020 - Cassandra Developer Workshop (France)
• 6/3/2020 - Developer Workshop: NoSQL performance benchmarking made easy!
• 6/10/2020 - Kafka Connector (Registration coming soon)
• 6/11/2020 - DataStax Kubernetes Operator (Asia)
• 6/17/2020 - APIs and Spring

Burning Questions

Here are some discussions we’ve been following:

• This thread on the Cassandra mailing list on setting the JVMs MaxDirectMemory on your Cassandra nodes - Jeff Jirsa’s response is especially useful.
• A user recently asked on community.datastax.com about using a virtual IP in place of contact points. Check out why VIPs and load-balancers aren’t necessary.

What else is on your mind? Topics we should explore? Projects we should highlight? We’d love your feedback: developer@datastax.com | @DataStaxDevs.