The introduction of K8ssandra at KubeCon in November 2020 was a turning point for the Apache Cassandra™ community. K8ssandra elegantly bridges the gap and unites two powerful forces driving innovation in modern data applications: Kubernetes and Cassandra. Since that unveiling, the K8ssandra engineers have been busy adding features, hardening, and improving performance. Today, we’re excited to announce that enterprise-level support for K8ssandra 1.0.0 is now available through DataStax Luna.
What is K8ssandra?
K8ssandra is a simple, cohesive deployment solution for implementing a production-ready Cassandra environment on Kubernetes. To unpack that a little further, the K8ssandra open source project is initially a collection of Helm charts that are used to package, install, and maintain a complete Cassandra environment. DevOps teams and Site reliability engineers (SREs) have long faced the challenge of running stateful database solutions on Kubernetes on their own. No longer! All the necessary components for a simple and robust Cassandra experience on Kubernetes are automatically wired together at install time without the need to alter configurations or settings. The best of breed open source components incorporated in K8ssandra include cass-operator (Kubernetes operator), Medusa for backup and restore, Reaper for repair, Prometheus and Grafana for metrics collection and visualization, and Stargate, a data gateway that provides REST, GraphQL, and Document APIs.
The primary motivation for bringing K8ssandra to the Cassandra community is to simplify the DevOps experience when working with a stateful Kubernetes-based distributed database.
SREs no longer have to manage and maintain all the packages, configurations, and dependencies necessary to run a production-ready environment. K8ssandra seamlessly orchestrates cluster lifecycle events such as version upgrades, configuration file changes, and rolling restarts of the nodes in the cluster. The inclusion of Reaper and Medusa in the K8ssandra distribution eliminates the need for custom integrations to handle repair and backup and restore tasks. Furthermore, K8ssandra provides preconfigured metrics and monitoring integration so you always know the health of your cluster.
“New Relic is highly supportive of standardizing community-supported tools for operating and managing Cassandra clusters. We are excited about the K8ssandra launch and look forward to actively contributing and collaborating with the broader open source community. This is a great starting point for new and existing users to run Cassandra in Kubernetes and benefit from direct access to the best available Cassandra expertise and practices,” said Tom Offermann, Lead Software Engineer at New Relic.
Development is greatly simplified now that Stargate has been baked into the K8ssandra deployment. Stargate allows developers to use industry standard APIs such as REST and GraphQL to read and write data from Apache Cassandra without relying on CQL or language specific drivers. The Document API, another innovative feature available in Stargate, drives simplicity and productivity. JSON documents can easily be stored and retrieved through the schemaless Document API without the upfront, labor-intensive data modeling exercises required for traditional database schemas.
Since K8ssandra is Kubernetes-based, it offers the freedom to implement and operate on your infrastructure of choice. K8ssandra integrates with the managed Kubernetes services of cloud providers to deliver true multi- and hybrid cloud capabilities. It can be deployed on bare metal in your existing data centers or even deployed on your local machine for test or development purposes.
If all of this sounds like a lot to digest, don’t worry! DataStax, the company whose experts have been helping lead the evolution of the Cassandra project, now offers a subscription through DataStax Luna to partner with and provide an enterprise-level support experience for K8ssandra users. Luna subscribers have access to the DataStax support site and can file tickets to have a Support Engineer address configuration questions, best practices, or troubleshoot any errors regarding your K8ssandra implementation. Whether you are well down the road on your Kubernetes journey or just starting out, DataStax is here to help!
Follow the documentation here to get started with K8ssandra today!
Additional Resources:
Blog: Why K8ssandra?
Blog: K8ssandra 1.0 Stable Release and What's Next
Video: K8ssandra at KubeCon
Cassandra on Kubernetes Class: https://www.datastax.com/learn/apache-cassandra-operations-in-kubernetes
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