DataStax Astra Now Available, Bringing Apache Cassandra Performance, Reliability, and Scale to the Cloud

SANTA CLARA, Calif. – May 12, 2020 – DataStax today announced the general availability of DataStax Astra, a database-as-a-service (DBaaS) for Apache Cassandra® applications, simplifying cloud-native Cassandra application development. 

The DBaaS reduces deployment time from weeks to minutes, removing the biggest obstacle to using Cassandra, which is behind many of the most heavily used applications in the world. Developers can access Astra now at astra.datastax.com/register and on Google Cloud’s Marketplace.

Cassandra is a popular choice when applications need to support massive amounts of data with zero tolerance for downtime. According to research conducted by ClearPath Strategies, developers and operators cite the top two reasons for using Cassandra as a good hybrid solution (62 percent) and highly scalable (57 percent); however, 36 percent of practitioners cite a lack of skilled staff as the top obstacle to Cassandra adoption. Astra helps overcome that operational challenge by making Cassandra’s masterless, scale-out architecture and linear scalability easily accessible as an on-demand cloud service. 

DataStax offers free workshops to help developers learn, create, and/or use Cassandra in Astra. Join the next online Cassandra Developer workshop series on May 20, 2020 by registering here. 

"Astra represents a breakthrough for anyone who wants to use Cassandra in the cloud," said Ed Anuff, chief product officer at DataStax. "We’ve been delivering products built on Cassandra to enterprises that deploy global-scale data for over a decade. Our enterprises and users have been asking for Database-as-a-Service in the cloud. We're happy to offer Astra as that experience." 

On Google Cloud, Astra deploys and manages enterprise clusters powered by Cassandra directly on top of Google Cloud’s Platform infrastructure, so that data sits in the same Google Cloud global infrastructure as applications. This means users and enterprises can deliver a high-performance experience with one of the most scalable databases on Google Cloud.

"At Google Cloud, we are committed to bringing the best open source technologies to our customers, and we are delighted that DataStax Astra is now available on Google Cloud. Our customers have asked for Cassandra on Google Cloud and now they can easily deploy and scale their clusters in the cloud," said Manvinder Singh, Director, Partnerships at Google Cloud. "Together, we’re bringing the best of open source and Cassandra expertise to our customers."

Astra users will find a consistent developer experience with open-source Cassandra tools and APIs, as well as REST and GraphQL endpoints and a browser-based CQL shell.

Enterprises, users, and partners endorsing and/or using Astra: 

Cengage is the education and technology company built for learners. Cengage leads affordable learning with digital learning platforms, college textbooks, ebooks, and an unlimited subscription to over 22,000 digital products. "Finally! An easy, straight-forward managed service for our Cassandra workloads. I have been waiting for an easy, out-of-the-box solution for our users. DataStax Astra hits all of the needs for our organization," said Michael Heinen, manager, platform operations, cloud operations at Cengage. 

Cisco is the worldwide technology leader that has been making the internet work since 1984. "Our team has been working for the past couple of years to ensure our infrastructure is set up to scale to meet unforeseen challenges," said Maniyarasan Selvaraj, lead Cisco engineer. "Cassandra is at the center of this with its reliability, resilience, and scalability. We are looking forward to the new release of DataStax Astra that could offer us an easier, better experience for Cassandra deployment and application development in the cloud."

Datical brings DevOps to the database with automation. Datical's powerful database release automation tools help companies release software faster. "Astra is hands-down the best solution for Cassandra developer productivity. It eliminates all of the overhead involved in setting up Cassandra. With Astra, developers can fully automate their CI/CD pipelines for Cassandra support. This means they can concentrate on more important tasks," said Robert Reeves, chief technology officer, of Datical.

FamilySearch is the largest genealogy organization in the world. Millions of people use FamilySearch records, resources, and services each year to learn more about their family history. "At FamilySearch, we have worked hard to establish a technical infrastructure that enables an always-on operation for our customers. DataStax Enterprise and Cassandra are core elements of that infrastructure, enabling us to scale the data tier for our applications to meet the demands of our patrons," said Tom Creighton, chief technology officer at FamilySearch. "DataStax Astra aligns very nicely with our overall DevOps model of automated infrastructure in the cloud. This product directly addresses one of the biggest issues surrounding the adoption of Cassandra in an enterprise – the difficulty of provisioning and managing Cassandra clusters. We look forward to continuing our partnership with DataStax and are pleased to see the continued advancement of their product, solutions, and service offerings."

Kong is used by thousands of developers across the world to secure, manage, and orchestrate microservice APIs. "APIs are about powering large amounts of data in motion, which is why many of Kong's customers have chosen Apache Cassandra. We were excited when we heard that DataStax was making Astra work with Kong. This will enable our users to experience the simplicity and scale of DataStax’s cloud-native service built on Apache Cassandra," said Kristian Györkös, senior director of alliances at Kong.

Venmo is a mobile payment service owned by PayPal. "At a time when data limits are being tested, every business needs to be a digital business. That means your infrastructure needs to be solid," says Dipak Chandan, senior engineering manager at Venmo. "We already use Cassandra for the reliability and resilience to handle big workloads with zero downtime. The promise of Astra is a true Database-as-a-Service with no ops. This will help developers work more efficiently so they can spend more time innovating." 

To learn more about Astra, join us for Accelerate: A NoSQL Original Series and catch the "2 Years of Transformation in 2 Months: The Data Firehose" panel on May 12, 2020. Register here. 

Availability

Astra is available now at astra.datastax.com/register and on Google Cloud Marketplace. Astra is also available on Amazon Web Services (AWS) with support for Microsoft Azure expected to follow.

Resources: 

Blog: Welcome to DataStax Astra
Blog: Astra: The Future of Apache Cassandra is Cloud Native
Workshop: Building Applications on Astra with BetterBotz
Cassandra Workshops: www.datastax.com/company/events/cassandra-developer-workshop
Astra on Google Cloud Platform: www.datastax.com/platform/google-cloud-platform
Astra on Amazon Web Services: https://www.datastax.com/platform/amazon-web-services
Virtual conference: Accelerate 2020: A NoSQL Original Series

About DataStax
DataStax is the company behind the massively scalable, highly available, cloud-native NoSQL data platform built on Apache Cassandra®. DataStax gives users and enterprises the freedom to run data in any cloud at a global scale with zero downtime and zero lock-in. More than 450 of the world’s leading enterprises including Capital One, Cisco, Comcast, Delta Airlines, eBay, Macy’s, McDonald’s, Safeway, Sony, and Walmart use DataStax to build transformational data architectures for real-world outcomes. For more, visit DataStax.com and @DataStax.

Apache, Apache Cassandra, and Cassandra are either registered trademarks or trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation or its subsidiaries in Canada, the United States, and/or other countries.

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Data from a forthcoming DataStax research report. Research conducted by ClearPath Strategies who surveyed 1,404 IT professionals and executives from April 13-23, 2020. Respondent roles included Developers (30 percent), CIO/CTO (19 percent), Managers (17 percent), Operators (14 percent), Data scientists/engineers (7 percent), Architects (5 percent), and DevOps (3 percent). The survey included a mix of company sizes: 35% SME (<1K employees), 65% Enterprise (1K+), including 24% Large Enterprise (10K+). Respondents hailed from 13 geographies (Argentina, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, the UK, and the US) and took the survey in 8 languages corresponding to these geographies. While the margin of sampling error cannot technically be calculated for online panel populations where the relationship between sample and universe is unknown, the margin of sampling error for equivalent representative samples would be +/- 2.6 percent.