Real-time Data Just Got a Lot Easier

Astra Streaming is GA! The open data stack that just works is here.

Yesterday was an exciting day at DataStax. We announced that Astra Streaming, our high-scale messaging and event streaming service, is generally available. With new built-in support for Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ, and JMS, it’s a powerful service that can turn all enterprise data-in-motion into real-time streaming data. You can read about the new capabilities in Astra Streaming here. 

This news is an important part of something big. With Astra Streaming, which is built on open-source Apache Pulsar™, and DataStax Astra DB, our managed database service built on Apache Cassandra®, we now deliver an open stack that unifies all aspects of real-time data: both operational data-at-rest and streaming data-in-motion. With this cloud-native stack, organizations can mobilize all enterprise data for real-time applications, build smarter applications faster, and scale without limits on any cloud.

It’s go time for real-time data

Why is this critical to digital businesses today? To stay relevant, enterprises need to do more than capture and warehouse data for future intelligence. Winning businesses activate data in real time to deliver in-the-moment experiences to customers, create instant intelligence, or fuel machine learning. Those who can’t deliver these real-time experiences and capabilities risk becoming irrelevant.

But this can be hard. Companies of all sizes have been challenged with data complexity and fragmentation. Real-time data is too often locked away in silos, scattered about organizations in disparate technologies and point solutions. Enterprises and the developers who build the real-time experiences that customers demand haven’t been able to access data with the speed and at the scale required to accomplish their goals. 

The good news: the vision of real-time data can be a reality today for most organizations. The technology is here. 

The open data stack that just works

At DataStax, we partner with developers and enterprises to deliver an open data stack that serves real-time applications – one that just works.

Astra DB makes operational data-at-rest easy to use and build on. It’s cloud native, with pay-as-you-go simplicity. But the world is in constant motion, and Astra Streaming enables real-time data to be acted upon as it’s generated. In other words, it allows actions to become visible to all of an enterprise’s applications, in real-time. 

Take Overstock, a U.S. online retailer. Overstock uses streaming technology to understand and act upon real-time data organization-wide, enabling the company to respond to customer actions with magically fast, relevant offers and personalized experiences. 

As a result, Overstock teams can reliably transform data in flight in a way that’s easy to use and requires less data engineering. This makes it much easier to delight their customers—and ultimately drive more revenue.

Building momentum

I’m super excited about our momentum. We announced 350% year-over-year sales growth in Astra DB in Q1, and, just a few weeks ago, we unveiled a new $115 million funding round led by Goldman Sachs Asset Management.

We see a massive opportunity for our customers and users: to get value, in real time, from all their data. We are building on our foundation as a database leader with a new mission: to serve real-time applications with an open data stack that just works. 

Thank you to the Cassandra and Pulsar communities, our enterprises, and developers.