Finally! An Elastic, Pay-As-You-Go Serverless Database Built on Cassandra Is Now on Azure

We’re excited to announce the general availability of DataStax Astra, our serverless multi-cloud Database as a Service (DBaaS) offering, built on Apache Cassandra® on Microsoft Azure. 

Astra, which is now available on the three largest cloud providers, can be found in the Azure marketplace or via the familiar Astra portal on our website. To help get you started, we will provide a free $25 monthly credit and access to Azure data centers in the United States, Europe, and Australia.

Deploying serverless Astra on Azure

Our overarching goal with Astra is to empower users to leverage the best capabilities of Cassandra, with the least amount of friction and expense. In March, we announced the general availability of Astra serverless, the industry’s first and only multi-cloud serverless database-as-a-service. 

The pay-as-you-go pricing model enabled by serverless was proven by analyst firm (GigaOm) to reduce the total cost of ownership by 75% in this recent report. We’ve reduced friction by giving developers the ability to build on Cassandra quickly and easily via Stargate, a data API gateway that sits between an app and the databases it uses. 

Adding Azure as a choice for deployment is the latest step in this journey. Nearly every enterprise wants to enable digital transformation with a cloud-first strategy and avoid painful and expensive migrations. In the age of the cloud, this means avoiding cloud vendor lock-in and partnering with vendors that are platform independent and offer multi-cloud, hybrid solutions. 

Autoscaling speeds up time to market

Astra is the only elastic, scalable, cloud-native database built on Cassandra that offers a truly consumption-based model for operations and billing. The service scales out and in, based on usage, and you only pay for the amount of reads, writes, storage, and data egress. If the database is inactive, you pay nothing.

Say goodbye to capacity planning. If you know your average traffic patterns, just visit our Astra pricing page for a cost estimate. Forget about sitting in front of a dashboard to provision and de-provision compute units, tune clusters, and specify compaction.

Let's talk about why Astra on Azure is interesting… Cassandra is one of the world’s most powerful NoSQL databases. Astra abstracts all of the operational aspects enabling developers to focus on apps and delivery. The new elastic scaling model gracefully handles bursts and unpredictable workloads automatically. Autoscaling is your ticket to success because it speeds up time to market 

It requires no prior knowledge of Cassandra. Anyone can set up a database in just a few clicks: pick an Astra region, select APIs or drivers and connect their app in minutes. There are virtually no limits when it comes to choice of apps or the scaling that is required.

Getting started

Get started on Astra today! You can begin with the cost-effective pay-as-you-go plan, which comes loaded with free credits and requires no credit card. When applied to the Astra US Data Center, these credits are good for 80GB storage,and 41 million IOPS. If you’re looking to use Azure Marketplace credits you can get started here.