Fit for the Future: Apache Cassandra 4.0 Beta Now Available

The Apache Cassandra community has been working tirelessly on the quality of the core database to build an indestructible foundation that you can trust to handle your most demanding data challenges. 

The release of the Cassandra 4.0 beta marks a major achievement for the project that has poured over 1000 bug fixes, improvements, and new features into this release; see the community's blog post for details. 

Join the community on the path to GA by running your workloads against the 4.0 beta in your test environments today and kick the tires in a few clicks on your laptop by downloading DataStax Desktop.

Why is the Cassandra 4.0 release such an important milestone?

Cloud computing and Kubernetes have transformed the way that we build, deploy, and run stateless applications. This new breed of application scales as traffic fluctuates, is resilient to a range of failure scenarios, and is containerized, allowing it to predictably run across different environments. Stacks that are fully cloud-native have these characteristics at every layer; from the application, to the database, to the infrastructure that it runs on. Cassandra fits perfectly as the database of choice in this cloud-native stack because of its peer-to-peer architecture, extreme elasticity, and incredible resilience.

That said, there is groundwork to be done, both in Cassandra and Kubernetes to serve these cloud-native applications with a data tier that matches the same attributes as the stateless components. Cassandra 4.0 contains many pieces of this foundational work to hammer out rare edge cases of unavailability during topology changes and to scale elastically when adding capacity to the cluster. 

With this work nearing completion, it's time to ramp up Cassandra's cloud-native chapter.

We've been doing our homework to prepare for this mission by running thousands of Cassandra clusters on Kubernetes in DataStax Astra, powered by our Cassandra Kubernetes Operator. This experience has taught us the complexities of running stateful applications on Kubernetes and we've been working with the community to bring these learnings back to open source. 

Today's application developers also deserve more from Cassandra. New APIs are coming to the forefront, offering more power, flexibility, and speed to modern cloud native application developers than ever before

Lastly, our users have made it clear that it has to be easier to get data out of Cassandra, both for reactive streams based use cases and for integrating with other systems to enable their applications with search, analytics and machine learning capabilities. This is a top focus for us as we look to mold Cassandra into a natural fit for all modern microservices. 

The Cassandra 4.0 release is the start of this cloud-native future. We are excited to write this story together with the community and hope that you will join us on this collective journey.    

Download 4.0 beta on your laptop: https://downloads.datastax.com/#desktop
Install 4.0 beta in your test environments: https://cassandra.apache.org/download/
Read the Cassandra community blog: https://cassandra.apache.org/blog/2020/07/20/apache-cassandra-4-0-beta1.html
Join the Cassandra community: https://cassandra.apache.org/community/