DevOps Articles

Datastax Astra Offers a Serverless Option for Cassandra

Continuing with its efforts to make the open source Apache Cassandra database more accessible to users, DataStax has finished preliminary development of its Astra serverless software, which the company says is production ready as “the industry’s first and only open, multicloud serverless database.” Instead, they code as they normally would to use a Cassandra database instance and the scale is handled on the backend, with both the ability to scale down to zero and to scale up to whatever size and rate of data transfer is needed.

Basically, what you need to do is separate the compute parts of the database, the parts that go and handle the requests from your app and process the queries, from the storage, where your data is persisted, and you need to do that in a way that you can dynamically scale,” explained Ed Anuff, chief product officer with DataStax, in an interview.

And while Cassandra is known for being able to scale out, he said that this separation of compute from storage was really the key ingredient to being able to make scaling down as easy as scaling up.

We really want this to be something that Cassandra itself is used for, and when people go and say, ‘What database should we use?’ they’re going to use Cassandra because it’s serverless.”