Run K8ssandra on VMware Tanzu and Cut Hybrid Database’s Operational Complexity by Half

Apache Cassandra®, the open source, distributed, and leaderless NoSQL database, has proven to be the backend of choice for modern applications. Like Cassandra, containerized microservices are a distributed system. Today, Kubernetes is the container orchestration platform of choice for launching and operating microservices. So now you have two open-source distributed systems working side by side. Running one distributed system is complicated as it is. Running two distributed systems—one in the application layer and another in the data layer gets particularly tricky. To simplify this complexity, DataStax came up with K8ssandra (a portmanteau of Kubernetes and Cassandra), an open-source, cloud-native distribution of Cassandra that provides everything you need to automate the deployment and operations of Cassandra on Kubernetes. With K8ssandra, you can use Kubernetes as a single control plane for managing Kubernetes pods and data clusters, greatly reducing the headaches associated with operating two distributed systems.

Due to inertia in moving off legacy systems, and the need to support data sovereignty and regional latency optimization, the world of infrastructure in the near future is going to be a hybrid one. Enterprises will move some workloads to the cloud, but they’ll continue to run some of their workloads on premises, and place others at the edge of the network. That’s why we’re excited to announce that DataStax has certified K8ssandra on the VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid. 

VMware has been the king of enabling enterprises to run their workloads on virtualized infrastructure on prem, but with Tanzu they’re also playing a leading role in helping enterprises sync their applications and data workloads in a hybrid environment—whether it’s on prem, at the edge, and in any public cloud. This is aligned with DataStax’s vision of providing enterprises with the freedom to control their own destiny, and not be locked into any particular vendor when it comes to data management.

Running K8ssandra with VMware Tanzu confers major benefits beyond doing it with plain Kubernetes. For example, VMware Harbor Registry - an enterprise private registry - makes it easy to manage K8ssandra images for deployment to VMware Tanzu with enterprise-grade security and identity management. There’s more. Apache Cassandra can be run seamlessly in a hybrid environment that involves multiple on-prem and cloud clusters. Enterprises that run K8ssandra on Tanzu gain the ability to manage Cassandra clusters across clouds from VMware Tanzu Mission Control, so they can easily manage access, apply security policies, and inspect clusters for security and configuration risks. This reduces operational burden and unleashes developer productivity to amplify the benefits of Cassandra atop Kubernetes.

K8ssandra also bundles another DataStax contributed open-source project called Stargate, which enables you to expose the Cassandra database to developers as industry-standard APIs such as REST, schemaless JSON, or GraphQL. Now developers don’t have to worry about learning any database query language; they can use the languages and APIs they are already familiar with, and get a jump-start on productivity. 

So now we have a simplified way of running microservices on a powerful data backend with less operational headache using a widely popular Kubernetes distribution. We also increase developer productivity by exposing the data backend as modern APIs, and give businesspeople the freedom of choice for running their modern workloads on any cloud. 

To learn more about the advantages of running K8ssandra on VMware Tanzu, check out this whitepaper. Read more about VMware Tanzu, K8ssandra, and what DataStax has done to make it easy to run Cassandra on VMware.