Dataworkz accelerates the creation of artificial intelligence (AI) applications by offering a service that unifies data, processing, and machine learning (ML) in a simple, intuitive visual interface for business analysts, data engineers, and citizen data scientists.

The Hunt for a Managed Cassandra Solution

Like many startups, a small group of people did most of the development work during Dataworkz’s earliest days. The development team included experienced Apache CassandraⓇ developers, so when a column store was needed to build a high-performance, highly scalable activity stream module, Cassandra was a natural choice. However, with the company’s limited resources dedicated to developing its product offering, the Dataworkz team didn’t have time to manage its own Cassandra clusters with maintenance, backups, and upgrades overhead.

​​Dataworkz explored cloud-native options for a Cassandra database-as-a-service (DBaaS) that could form part of Dataworkz’s multi-modal data platform environment, which also included relational and graph-based databases. Dataworkz team determined that DataStax, and its serverless Astra DB on AWS offering, met all its requirements for a column store—with the advantage of pay-as-you-go pricing.

Astra DB on AWS’s high performance and reliability are ideal for the Dataworkz platform

To meet the company’s needs better, Dataworkz switched to DataStax Astra DB on AWS. Astra DB on AWS was very easy to set up, with strong, enterprise-grade security, fast queries, global availability, and scalability. Dataworkz especially values Astra DB’s cost-effective, consumption-based model, providing the flexibility a startup like Dataworkz needs.

In addition, Smotra’s team can “time travel” and restore a backup within 20 days, if needed.

Dataworkz appreciates Astra DB on AWS’s enterprise-grade security, which encrypts data in motion and at rest and includes support for bringing your encryption key (BYOK) management. Options for private connectivity like VPC peering and Private Link and SAML SSO integration with identity providers further enhance the service.

Astra DB on AWS’s high performance and reliability is ideal for handling and documenting high volumes of events as part of Dataworkz’s product activity stream. This activity stream tracks all actions performed within the Dataworkz system to uniquely foster data team collaboration. With many enterprises relying on disparate data sources often in silos, Dataworkz fuses data discovery, transformation, and correlation in a seamless customer experience.

Looking Ahead:

Dataworkz sees immense opportunity in making artificial intelligence (AI) and data analytics processes more transparent.

Dataworkz has relied on Astra DB on AWS for nearly a year with 100% uptime and is pleased with its new vector capabilities.

“For Dataworkz, having a vector database is important to harness large language models for either question answering systems insights and intelligent summarization. Astra DB on AWS vector capabilities is a really great addition for us.”

In the meantime, the company has successfully expanded its business from early customers to new clients.

The company’s Astra DB on AWS consumption will grow as they sign up more customers. The pay-as-you-go model offered by DataStax helps Dataworkz conserve its working capital and focus its budget on developing product features that customers want.

Astra DB on AWS’s global scale across all AWS regions helps Dataworkz reliably serve clients with operations worldwide. Although most of Dataworkz's current deployments are in us-west-1 and us-west-2 region, they are actively working with the European division of a customer to deploy Dataworkz in eu-central-1 region to meet the requirement for storing all data in the EU.