DataStax Luna provides Enterprise-Grade Support for the Most Reliable, Elastic, and Fastest Cassandra Ever

We are very excited to announce that we are offering Luna for Apache Cassandra® (C*) 4.01 starting today! This means that you can run Open Source Cassandra 4.0 and have the peace of mind of receiving enterprise-grade support from DataStax. The incredible C* community deserves hearty congratulations for the amazing work they have done with the upcoming 4.0 release. You can thank this community for: 

• The Most Stable and Reliable C* Ever . 2.3x more bugs were addressed in Cassandra 4.0 than in Cassandra 3.0; addressing those bugs improves correctness, elasticity, and scalability. Additionally, the community has adopted new testing approaches: Replay, Property, and Fault-Injection testing are some of the approaches used to create a robust and stable release. Upgrade testing was introduced to ensure a smooth-as-silk upgrade process.

• 25% - 85% Better Performances. Support for newer Java runtimes (Java 11) has unlocked performance gains in 4.0. Performance testing has revealed a 25% increase in throughput and 30% reduction in latency when using CMS GC with Cassandra 4.0 on Java 11 versus Cassandra 3.11 on JDK8. We saw an 85% reduction in P99 client latencies when using Shenandoah GC on Java 11 versus Cassandra 3.11 on JDK8. Check out this blog post for additional benchmarking information.                                                                                                                                                                                In another area of improvement, new and improved zero-copy streaming capabilities cut down the time required to complete streaming tasks by up to 5x. Compaction enhancements have also cut memory consumption.
• Ease of Observability. A new feature called virtual tables gives users the ability to access stats via CQL. Various elements, including configuration settings, metrics, or running compactions, can all be accessed via CQL, resulting in a better UX and access control.                                                                                                                                                                                          Prior to 4.0, C* users never had a great way to do audit logging. An entirely new audit logging capability has been introduced, which gives users a performant way to track database and user level activity, while minimally impacting the read/write path.                                                                                                                                                                                                            Production-safe full query logging is also available. This new feature is useful for live traffic capture, as well as traffic replay; it can also be used for debugging query traffic. 

If you are still on C* 3, you should hop on the C*4 bandwagon! More throughput, less latency, with less resources, and easier to monitor; that’s free money in the bank . We totally get that users and enterprises need peace of mind when running their applications on open source software. That’s why we launched Luna , a subscription service that offers support from the experts who heavily contributed to the Cassandra code. Luna subscribers will get support for general-purpose and technical questions regarding their open source Cassandra deployments. DataStax is here to help with any issues. As a company, we are committed to supporting C* and openly embracing open source software; we view Luna as proof of this commitment. 

Luna comes as a tiered subscription based on three packages: Essentials, Professional, and Enterprise. There are no node limits and subscribers get access to the Luna portal to interact with a world-class C* support team. Once on the portal, you can file general-purpose or technical questions and get answers back within specified SLAs. Starting today, C* 4.0 will be on this list of supported versions for Luna.

But wait, there’s more! Not only do we have a team of engineers working toward open source C* releases, but we also have many people working on projects like K8ssandra , a production-ready way of running C* on Kubernetes. We’ll continue to move the community forward by extending Luna support to cover running C* 4.0 in Kubernetes with K8ssandra.

• We are supporting the current 4.0-RC1 version as of the time of writing this post. We will support the GA version of C* 4.0 once it is released.