Why You Can't Miss Cassandra Summit

Wondering how Netflix handles data partitions in Apache Cassandra? Looking for tips on how to build and manage huge Cassandra clusters? Then clear your calendar Dec.12 and Dec. 13, because Cassandra Summit, a gathering of the top minds in the Cassandra community, is happening in San Jose, Calif., along with the AI.dev Open Source GenAI & ML Summit, which will include presentations by Hugging Face, LlamaIndex, Nvidia, AWS, and DataStax. This double-header will provide you with a great crossover of subject matter, as we all know that Cassandra is the best database for AI/ML workloads. 

The world of NoSQL databases has changed a lot since the first Cassandra Summits of a decade ago. Cassandra database deployments evolved from on-premise, bare-metal servers to vast cloud implementations and even Cassandra database services. This year has seen the rise of vector databases; Cassandra continues to fulfill the needs of developers by answering with its own vector search offering. And of course, everyone is anticipating hearing more about Cassandra 5.0 and the future of features such as Transactional Cluster Metadata and ACID Transactions.

At the Cassandra Summit, there are a wide selection of great talks to attend. The only question is “what are you most interested in?” While many talks focus on the nuts and bolts of Cassandra’s internals, there are also several talks that discuss use cases and various implementations of how Cassandra supports the backend systems of many popular applications and services.

For instance, almost everyone watches Netflix. But did you know that Cassandra powers the data and services behind the latest series that everyone is binge watching? This year’s Summit features two talks by Netflix engineers, including “How Netflix Delivers Key-Value and Time-Series Storage at Any Scale” (by Joey Lynch & Vidhya Arvind) and “Improving Bad Partition Handling in Apache Cassandra” (by Cheng Wang & Jordan West). You can’t go wrong with insights on Cassandra from Netflix.

Maybe you’re running a large Cassandra cluster, and you want to expand your personal troubleshooting toolbox to handle any performance issues that may arise. Look no further than Jon Haddad’s “Cassandra Performance Tuning Like You’ve Been Doing It for Ten Years.” Jon has been building and administering extremely large clusters for ten years, so he has a lot of great tips and tactics to keep your cluster running smoothly.

Want to know more about how Cassandra powers the services behind the famous “Bloomberg Terminal'' financial platform? Be sure to check out Isaac Reath and Lindsey Zurovchak’s talk. “Deciphering Cassandra’s Prophecy: Preventing the Fall of Your Application.” They’ll discuss some of the mistakes that they’ve made with Cassandra, but also (most importantly) the lessons learned and how they recovered and remained successful.

Perhaps you want to know more about how to use Cassandra in e-commerce? In that case, I look forward to seeing you in my session titled “Guerilla Tactics for Building Scalable E-Commerce Services with Apache Cassandra®, Apache Pulsar®, and Vector Search.” In this session, I combine the technical aspects of building services on Cassandra with my hands-on, retail experience (Grainger and Target) to give you a no-nonsense approach to building reliable systems designed to drive billions of dollars in sales.

What I’m looking forward to most is the chance to see everyone in-person. DataStax has always been a distributed company, and conferences like this one are a chance for me to hang out with my co-workers and fellow Cassandra aficionados. We have been working hard to improve the Cassandra experience for several years, and to see the Cassandra Summit resurrected and well-attended is our own assurance of a job well done..

I hope to see you there. Be sure to register for the Cassandra Summit and check out the schedule to find talks that might interest you.