What is Apache Cassandra®?

Apache Cassandra is an open source non-relational, or NoSQL, a database that enables continuous availability,
tremendous scale, and data distribution across multiple data centers and cloud availability zones.

Simply put, Cassandra provides a highly reliable data storage engine for applications requiring immense scale.

Get to know Apache Cassandra better in this blog.

Open Source Apache Cassandra®

Apache Cassandra was originally developed at Facebook, and in 2008 it was released as an open source project
on Google Code by the company. In 2010, it became a top-level Apache project.

The open source version of the Cassandra database is used by some of the largest technology companies in the
world to run mission-critical applications. It is widely known that the largest deployment of the open source
version of the Cassandra database is at Apple. Netflix is also a very large user of open source Apache
Cassandra—the foundation for big data. It is estimated that Cassandra is deployed by over 50% of the Fortune
500 companies.

Learn more about the health of Apache Cassandra community.

To know more about open source technologies and benefits of open source Cassandra, view our
webinar “Power of the Open Source”. The webinar is a great resource to understand the pitfalls of
proprietary technologies.

Cassandra’s Place in the NoSQL World

NoSQL includes a diverse range of technologies with specific NoSQL products suited to different use cases.
NoSQL database technology was designed to overcome the limitations of RDBMS technology on data size,
transaction throughput, scalability, reliability, and manageability, flexibility of data schema, and/or cost of
hardware.

Our CPO Ben Slater provides an understanding of where Cassandra fits in the NoSQL world as
well Cassandra’s ecosystem.

In the blog post “Surveying the Cassandra-compatible database landscape”, Ben Slater, CPO, Instaclustr
shares details on a range of Cassandra-compatible offerings available in the market.

Cassandra and Availability at Scale

Cassandra has a number of core features and benefits that deliver the capability to massively scale, while still
maintaining continuous and high availability without compromising performance.

Watch the YouTube video Cassandra Serving Netflix @ Scale – Vinay Chella, Netflix to see how Cassandra is
serving Netflix with several millions of operations/sec with multiple nines of availability with 250+ Clusters,
10,000+ Nodes and 3+ PB of data deployment. Download our whitepaper “How to Maximize Availability With
Apache Cassandra”  to learn various strategies you could apply for your Cassandra deployment. In this white
paper, you will learn the architectural, infrastructure, and application-level strategies.

How Cassandra Works

Cassandra has been designed with scale, performance, and continuous availability as the foundation
architecture principles.  Cassandra operates using a masterless ring architecture—it does not rely on a master-
slave relationship.

In Cassandra, all nodes play an identical role; there is no concept of a master node, with all nodes
communicating with each other via a distributed, scalable protocol. Writes are distributed among nodes using a
hash function and reads are channeled onto specific nodes.

Cassandra stores data by dividing the data evenly around its cluster of nodes. Each node is responsible for part
of the data. The act of distributing data across nodes is referred to as data partitioning.

Cassandra Architecture
Cassandra is a built-for-scale architecture, meaning that it is capable of handling large amounts of data and
millions of concurrent users or operations per second—even across multiple data centers—as easily as it can
manage much smaller amounts of data and user traffic. To add more capacity, you simply add new nodes to an
existing cluster without having to take it down first.  Unlike other master-slave or sharded systems, Cassandra
has no single point of failure and therefore is capable of offering true continuous availability and uptime.

The key components of the Cassandra architecture include the following terms and concepts:

Node: the specific instance where data is stored.

Rack: a set of nodes with a correlated chance of failure.
Datacenter: a collection of related nodes with a complete set of data.
Cluster: a component that contains one or more data centers.
Commit log: it is a crash-recovery mechanism in Cassandra. Every write operation is written to the commit
log.
Mem-table: a mem-table is a memory-resident data structure. A mem-table is a write-back cache residing
in memory that has not been flushed to disk yet.
SSTable: a Sorted String Table (SSTable) ordered immutable key value map. It is basically an efficient way
of storing large sorted data segments in a file. You may also be interested to read Instaclustr Open
Sources Cassandra sstable analysis tools and view our help page.
Bloom filter: is an extremely fast way to test the existence of a data structure in a set. A bloom filter can
tell if an item might exist in a set or definitely does not exist in the set. Bloom filters are a good way of
avoiding expensive I/O operation.

Cassandra Data Modeling

Cassandra is wide column store database. Its data model is a partitioned row store with tunable consistency. 
Rows are organized into tables; the first component of a table’s primary key is the partition key; within a partition,
rows are clustered by the remaining columns of the key. Other columns may be indexed separately from the
primary key. Tables may be created, dropped, and altered at run-time without blocking updates and queries.

Cassandra cannot do joins or subqueries. Rather, Cassandra emphasizes denormalization through features like

collections. A column family (called “table” since CQL3) resembles a table in an RDBMS. Column families
contain rows and columns. Each row is uniquely identified by a row key. Each row has multiple columns, each of
which has a name, value, and timestamp. Unlike a table in an RDBMS, different rows in the same column family
do not have to share the same set of columns, and a column may be added to one or multiple rows at any time.
Our white paper 6 Step Guide to Apache Cassandra Data Modeling sets out a methodical approach that we
use to define a data model for our customers deploying open source Cassandra. You can read more about Data
Modeling recommended practices on our support portal.

Apache Cassandra vs DynamoDB

One database which Cassandra is often compared with is the AWS DynamoDB. Both Cassandra and
DynamoDB offer incredible scale and availability. They both can serve 10’s of millions of reads and writes and
offer a level of resilience in the face of failure. Both technologies share a similar underlying architecture
(Dynamo) but that is where the similarities end. They are different in so many ways.

In the blog post “Surveying the Cassandra-compatible database landscape”, Ben Slater, CPO, Instaclustr shares
the range of Cassandra-compatible offerings available in the market. Download our white paper Apache
Cassandra vs DynamoDB to understand the differences and identify the technology you should adopt for your
unique use case.

Configuring and Operating Cassandra

The following are a number of blogs and good references that relate to configuring and operating Apache
Cassandra.

Cassandra Broadcast Address

When configuring Cassandra to work in a new environment or with a new application or service we sometimes
find ourselves asking about the difference between broadcast_address and broadcast_rpc_address”. Our blog
attempts to demystify Cassandra broadcast address.

Apache Cassandra Compaction Strategies

It is equally important to understand Cassandra Compaction Strategies. While regular compactions are an
integral part of any healthy Cassandra cluster, the way that they are configured can vary significantly depending
on the way a particular table is being used. Our technical article gives you an in-depth look into Cassandra
Compaction Strategies.

Apache Cassandra Tombstones

Multi-value data types are a powerful feature of Cassandra. However, some of Cassandra’s behaviour when
handling these data types is not always as expected and can cause issues. In particular, there can be hidden
surprises when you update the value of a collection type column. Our blog, Cassandra collections: hidden
tombstones and how to avoid them digs deeper into this space.

Apache Cassandra Best Practices

The right deployment strategies and best practices for Apache Cassandra can mean the difference between on-
time deployment of applications that scale massively, are always available, and perform blazingly fast, and those
that bring your applications to a crawl.

We have an abundance of resources on our support portal to help you with creating your cluster.

Download white paper on Avoiding the Pitfall and Challenges of Cassandra Implementation to identify
mistakes while implementing Cassandra for Big Data technology.

Cassandra CQL
Users can access Cassandra through its nodes using Cassandra Query Language (CQL). CQL treats the
database (keyspace) as a container of tables. CQL is a typed language and supports a rich set of data types,
including native types, collection types, user-defined types, tuple types, and custom types.

Programmers use cqlsh—a prompt to work with CQL or separate application language drivers. Read our support
article to understand how cqlsh can be used to connect to clusters in Instaclustr, and the blog Consulting
Cassandra: Second Contact with the Monolith (CQLSH).

Cassandra Migration
Planning to migrate to Cassandra? You need to keep a few things in mind, which include knowing when to
consider migration, how to prepare your application, as well as having an understanding of migration
approaches. Our CPO, Ben Slater’s presentation on migrating to Apache Cassandra is a great resource if you
are considering migrating your cluster to Cassandra.

Deploying Apache Cassandra

The following are some key resources and information related to deploying Cassandra in the cloud or within your
own private data center.

Cassandra and Multi-Data Center Clusters

One of the strongest features of Cassandra is its native support for the concept of multiple logical data
centers within a cluster. Multi-data center clusters allow Cassandra to support several different scenarios. While
at a high level, creating additional data centers in Cassandra is fairly straightforward, but in cross-region and
cross-provider scenarios, you would need to dig deeper. Our CPO, Ben Slater,  helps you to learn how
Instaclustr has made Multi-Data center clusters easy.
We conducted benchmarking for multi-data center Apache Spark and Apache Cassandra. The aim of this
benchmark study was to compare performances between one-data-center settings where Spark and Cassandra
are collocated, versus two-data-center settings where Spark is running on the second data center.

Download the presentation, Introduction to Managing Apache Cassandra. This presentation by Brooke Thorley,
VP Technical Operations and Customer Services, Instaclustr provides an introduction to managing Apache
Cassandra. If you are new to Cassandra, this presentation will help clear any doubts as you learn tricks used by
experts in managing Cassandra. Using Cassandra, but dealing with high severity incidents in unknown
environments in a Cassandra cluster?  You may find the presentation Apache Cassandra consulting and
firefighting useful.

Cassandra and Spark

Apache Spark usage goes back to Twitter, that used it as their data analytics solution, but it has become a full-
blown Apache project for many years now. Apache Spark is a high performing engine for large-scale analytics
and data processing. While Apache Spark provides advanced analytics capabilities, it requires a fast, distributed
backend data store. Apache Cassandra is the most modern, reliable, and scalable choice for that data store.
Spark when fully integrated with the key components of Cassandra, provides the resilience and scale required
for big data analytics. Spark supports a rich set of higher-level tools including Spark SQL, MLlib, GraphX, and
Spark Streaming.

One of the advantages of deploying Spark with Instaclustr is that it is a collocated data engine—it is right where
your operational database resides, with no need for extracting, transforming, and loading into a new
environment. Spark and Cassandra clusters are deployed to the same set of machines. Cassandra stores the
data; Spark worker nodes are co-located with Cassandra and do the data processing. Spark is a batch-
processing system, designed to deal with large amounts of data. When a job arrives, the Spark workers load
data into memory, spilling to disk if necessary.
A blog post by our CPO Ben Slater outlines some of the solution patterns where it makes sense to use Spark
Streaming alongside Cassandra.

Ben Bromhead, CTO, Instaclustr takes an in-depth look at how Spark and Cassandra can be used together in his
presentation “Processing 200K Transactions per Second with Apache Spark and Apache Cassandra”.

Our tutorial on getting started with Instaclustr Spark and Cassandra is a good starting point to learn how to
provision a cluster using Spark, Cassandra, and more.

Our technology evangelist, Paul Brebner, wrote an introductory “2001 Space Odyssey themed” series on using
Cassandra, Spark, and Zeppelin for Big Data Predictive Analytics (Machine Learning over Instaclustr’s
Instametrics Cassandra cluster monitoring data):

Third contact with a Monolith – Long Range Sensor Scan (using materialized views for summary statistics)
Third Contact with a Monolith – Beam Me Down Scotty (linear regression)
Third Contact with a Monolith – In the Pod (SPARK, MLLib, RDDs, Decision Trees)
Fourth Contact with a Monolith – DataFrames, ML Pipelines and Scala
Behind the Scenes – creating the wide table
Using a data notebook (Zeppelin) for data analytics with Cassandra and Spark

The final blog in the series covers Spark Streaming: Apache Spark Structured Streaming with DataFrames.

During the initial days when we released the Cassandra + Spark managed service offering, we have had
opportunities to dig deeper into using the Cassandra connector for Spark, both with our
own Instametrics application and while assisting customers with developing and troubleshooting. During this
process, we’ve learnt a few key lessons about how to get the best out of the Cassandra connector for Spark,
check out the 5-easy tips.

Cassandra on AWS
Cassandra on AWS EBS Infrastructure
Traditionally it was believed that Cassandra and AWS EBS don’t mix. However, with the release of the latest
generation EBS-optimized instances, this belief has changed, and we now know people have had success using
these nodes to run Cassandra. In his blog post, Ben answers many questions around Cassandra on AWS EBS
infrastructure and the Cost of Cassandra on AWS.

AWS-Lambda and Cassandra

AWS-Lambda is a simple way to execute a small portion of stateless code, on-demand, without the need to
provide any servers. AWS Lambda is often combined with AWS API gateway to provide the front end and
execution layer of a REST API. Check out our presentation Cassandra + Lambdascale POC to walk through a
POC that combines AWS Lambda, API Gateway, and Instaclustr Apache Cassandra Managed Service to power
a simple REST API.

VPC Peering
A VPC peering connection is a networking connection between two VPCs that enables you to route traffic
between them privately. Instaclustr supports VPC peering as a mechanism for connecting directly to your
Instaclustr managed cluster. VPC Peering allows you to access your cluster via private IP and results in a much
more secure network setup. View our support page on using VPC Peering.

AWS R4 Instances Type

R4 instances are the next generation of Amazon EC2 Memory Optimized instances. R4 instances are well-suited
for memory-intensive, latency-sensitive workloads like business intelligence (BI), data mining and analysis, in-
memory databases, distributed web scale in-memory caching, and applications performing real-time processing
of unstructured big data. We conducted Cassandra benchmarking of the R4 type against our existing M4
offerings and found significant performance improvements running fairly IO-intensive mixed workloads. Know
more.

Cassandra on Azure
Download the presentation “Tips and Tricks of Cassandra on Azure” to learn more about how to get started
with Cassandra on Azure—from production stage, through the first 6 months.

Apache Cassandra Kubernetes

Kubernetes is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized
applications. It has a large and rapidly growing ecosystem and the services, support, and tools are also widely
available.

Ben Bromhead, CTO, Instaclustr, in his presentation introduces Cassandra Kubernetes Operator, a Cassandra

controller that provides robust, managed Cassandra deployments on Kubernetes.

Cassandra and Multi-Cloud

Today companies want to be capable of being cloud agnostic and not beholden to one single vendor, so this has
made multi-cloud deployment highly desirable. But, simply moving to the cloud is hard enough. Our white paper
on “Why Choosing Apache Cassandra Is Planning for a Multi-Cloud Future”  outlines 5 reasons that make
Apache Cassandra an enabler for true multi-cloud deployments.

Cassandra and Data Layer Technologies

Cassandra is a database technology, providing the data store for an application or solution.  While the data
storage mechanism forms an incredibly important part of the data layer, there are other relevant technologies
that can be integrated and used.

However, it only forms one part of the data layer, with a range of other core open source technologies that can be
effectively integrated to provide a more complete data layer solution. The DbaaS is moving away from the
database and is including the data layer components that interact with the database, such as integrated data
software and related infrastructure.

The Instaclustr Managed Platform provides an integrated data layer with the following complementary open
source technologies.

The “Pick‘n’Mix: Cassandra, Spark, Zeppelin, Elassandra, Kibana, and Kafka” blog looks at possible ways of
using these technologies together.
Managed Cassandra Database
Cassandra is the database of choice for scalability, highly available, reliable, and high-performance applications.
Instaclustr Managed Service for Apache Cassandra gets you up and running quickly, and is the most reliable
way to run Cassandra for your application. We are so confident in the performance of our clusters that we
include latency and performance guarantees in our contracted SLAs.  You can enjoy our hosted and fully
managed Apache Cassandra on AWS, Azure, GCP, IBM cloud, or in your own private data center with 24×7
support.

Our Managed Cassandra comes with add ons:

Apache Lucene: The Cassandra Lucene Index plugin expands Cassandra’s native secondary index to perform
comprehensive search functionality through multivariable, geospatial, and bi-temporal search capabilities.
Cassandra Lucene Index resides right where your operational database resides, thus, no need for extracting,
transforming, and loading into a new environment.

Apache Zeppelin: Apache Zeppelin provides a notebook user interface to allow interactive development and
execution of code against both Cassandra and Spark, along with data visualization capabilities. Zeppelin gives
you an interactive analytics environment to start querying data in your Cassandra database or running complex
analytics using Apache Spark as soon as your cluster is provisioned. This blog covers Using a data notebook
(Zeppelin) for data analytics with Cassandra and Spark.

Cassandra Database as a Service

Exploring Cassandra as a Service? Download our white paper “Managing Reliability at Scale” which gives you
the big picture on engaging a managed service provider (MSP), and will help you understand why MSP is more
than just having someone to manage your database.

Our second white paper “The Unmatchable ROI of Managed Cassandra Service” will take you through the 3 key
points you need to consider when deciding between building your own Cassandra competency center or
outsourcing to an expert Cassandra service provider.

Cassandra Consulting
We have extensive experience in Apache Cassandra Consulting helping our customers develop and deploy high
performance and continually available solutions.

We offer a wide range of Consulting Service Packages that will help you take advantage of our expertise in open
source, and be guided by our team of experts

Talk to our Consultants

Apache Cassandra Support

At Instaclustr a dedicated team of technology and operational experts deliver support for Apache
Cassandra 24×7.

We provide support for all Cassandra database use cases as well as complimentary open source technologies
across various industries. We have gained a wealth of experience helping new companies to disrupt, and mature
companies looking to transform their business.

Watch a short video on Instaclustr support.

Get ready to create a cluster in under 10 minutes and explore ways to connect to and consult Cassandra.

Deploy Production Ready Certified

Cassandra
We announced the Instaclustr Certification Framework for Open Source Software and our first
certification, Instaclustr Certified Apache Cassandra.

Following a certification process across several critical variables, enterprises can build applications with even
greater confidence.

The Certification framework provides increased assurance that specific releases of Apache Cassandra have
been tested for a range of functional, performance, and integration properties prior to being enabled on the
Instaclustr Managed Platform.

Download the reports.