Apache Cassandra 4.0 is Now Delivered Via K8ssandra on Amazon EKS

It is now incredibly easy to run Apache Cassandra 4.0 on Kubernetes via the AWS Cloud Marketplace, with wider support to follow soon. Our code will do the hard work of setting up your Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) infrastructure according to Cassandra's high-availability best practices, and then configure Cassandra for you using K8ssandra. If you’ve ever operated Cassandra, K8ssandra is an awakening; rational, opinionated operations that will get you as close to a delightful Cassandra experience as possible without moving to Astra DB.

There's a story from almost exactly ten years ago that highlights for me how much has changed for Cassandra developers. I was working in geospatial analysis and we were looking at how we could use Cassandra to detect financial fraud in real-time as transactions were happening. At one point during the summer of 2011, I found myself face to face with our Cassandra cluster. I had played a little fast and loose with some cheap (for the time) SSDs. I ran out their endurance writing to Cassandra and compacting very aggressively, and now I had to unscrew them all from their brackets, screw the new ones into the brackets, and then replace all the drives. I cared about things like Cassandra's drive failure policies. "Infrastructure as code" had gotten about as far as some decent Puppet and Chef recipes to set up a Cassandra cluster. There were still too many screwdrivers involved in database management for my tastes.

Ten years later, I can't even remember the last time I even held a physical drive in my hands. Cassandra came into the world when the cloud was nascent. Operators were often in physical contact with their databases, a phenomenon that is vanishingly rare these days as more databases move into the cloud, and those that remain on-prem operate in environments that are run just like their public cloud counterparts. And so, Kubernetes helps everyone get more done by providing the consistent interface upon which we operate the datacenter today.

Databases have been a little slow to move to Kubernetes, due to concerns over a general lack of support for stateful workloads. But the Cassandra and cloud native communities have been aggressive in finding ways to overcome the challenges with Cassandra in Kubernetes. All that hard work and community collaboration has paid off and Cassandra 4.0 on Kubernetes kicks ass. If you're new to our community, you have joined at a great time, when the database itself has seen an exciting new release and the tools we use to operate Cassandra are better than they have ever been. If you're an old friend, I hope this exciting time piques your curiosity about this, and some of the other exciting things we've been working on.

Get started today with Cassandra 4.0 on Kubernetes. As a little bonus, all usage accrues Astra DB credit at a rate of $7/node/month ( exactly what this service costs). Reach out to cloud@datastax.com any time to activate your Astra credit and see what a true zero-ops Cassandra experience is like.