Developer Newsletter: DBA to SRE With K8ssandra

Great news! We’ve just launched our first learning content in support of a new certificate program: Apache Cassandra Operations in Kubernetes. The first three lessons include:

• Introduction: Deploying a Sample Application with Cassandra in Kubernetes 
• Running Cassandra in Docker 
• Managing Cassandra Clusters in Kubernetes Using the Cass-Operator 

Why are we doing this? Over the past couple of years the Cassandra community has been hard at work on projects like cass-operator and K8ssandra to realize the dream of running Cassandra on Kubernetes in production. This is putting a ton of energy back into the Cassandra project, especially for operators who are telling us that working on Kubernetes is keeping them relevant. 

We’ve been on this journey for a while together: Oracle DBA to Cassandra DBA. Now it’s time to take the next step: DBA to Site Reliability Engineer (SRE). DBAs have been super important in protecting data as a core business asset, but that role focuses on the database as the “what”. Now, we’re shifting to managing the entire application stack. Moving forward, it’s all about the “how” - how do we deploy applications in the cloud, maintain high availability, and keep cost under control? 

At DataStax we’ve been talking to DBAs to build out the skills tree and this new certification based on K8ssandra to help you make the transition to SRE. We’re releasing this learning material as we create it so that we can get your feedback in real-time and shape this body of knowledge together!

Notable Software Releases

This week, DataStax announced our entry into streaming, featuring our acquisition of Kesque, partnership with the Apache Pulsar community, and these releases:

• Luna Streaming - subscription support for Apache Pulsar (including Helm chart for quick Kubernetes install)
• DataStax Apache Pulsar Connector - push records from Pulsar topics to an Apache Cassandra, DataStax Enterprise, or Astra database

Upcoming Workshops 

• February 3 and 4: Cloud-Native Workshop: Bring streaming to Cassandra with Apache Pulsar!
• February 9: Certification Exam Preparation Workshop

Community Highlights from Cassandra.Link

• Witfoo - Our move from Elastic to Cassandra
• Upgrading a Large Cassandra Cluster with CStar
• Cassandra Use Cases: When To Use and When Not To Use Cassandra

Developer Survey

• We’ve partnered with SlashData to help identify the big software development trends for 2021 and beyond–and we want to be sure your voice is included. Take the new Developer Economics survey and answer a few questions about dev tools, platforms, technologies for a chance to win cool prizes!

Send us your likes, dislikes and pipe dreams at: developer@datastax.com | @DataStaxDevs.