FeatherCast

Cloud database offerings have expanded over the past decade, encompassing everything from virtualized machines in the cloud to entirely serverless databases. With this pace of innovation in the cloud ecosystem, Cassandra stands in a unique position to serve its users with unique advantages over any other system. This also puts Cassandra in an interesting position to compete with the ongoing innovations in the cloud. With the internal architecture and storage mechanism aside, citizen developers in the community are looking for several other operability aspects/ ecosystem around the services for the long term investments and benefits from such service. At this juncture, it is vital for the Cassandra dev community to build muscle around supporting such an ecosystem that the community is looking for, to be on par with rest of cloud services and other competing offers in the industry. Specifically, it is important for us to innovate and focus on improving these areas along with the rest of the product.
– Ease of use
– Simplified operability in the cloud, precisely simplified operability in the hybrid/multi-cloud
– Pluggability with other infrastructure services such as metrics, discovery, and monitoring
– Painless rollouts of version and protocol upgrades
– Elegant developer experience in polyglot environments
– Dev education of Cassandra best practices
– Unified access across the complex systems
As Cassandra stands today, operating the database requires either considerable labor, complex automation, or both. Some of this complexity is an unavoidable result of operating a distributed system, but much of it is operational complexity stemming from properties of C* itself. As a result of these complexities, C* operators spend too much time dealing with issues that the database should solve on its own, and are unable to reap the full benefit of Cassandra’s powerful distributed data model. As part of this talk, we will focus on how to address the aforementioned challenges to keep the Cassandra competitive within the cloud offerings and database services industry, with simplified operability and elegant developer and operator experience. We also hope to get Apache Cassandra 4.0 up and running in any cloud without a hassle with the help of the sidecar. We hope to leave a thought in the Cassandra dev community to start thinking about these areas in upcoming releases of Cassandra.