Are you new to Apache Cassandra® and wondering what all the excitement is about? Or a veteran Cassandra user interested in understanding what’s new in the project? Attend our live webinar on October 18 to learn about the latest Cassandra release and why it represents a big step forward but also all the initiative and new projects rising in the ecosystem, DataStax Director of Developer Relations Cedrick Lunven will walk you through new features in version 4.1. Get the inside scoop on how version 4.1 adds exciting new features for operators and improves the security posture, without compromising the stability achieved in Cassandra 4.0. Get some insights about projects actually in progress to make Cassandra more easy to use (Stargate) but also to deploy (K8ssandra). You will learn: System-wide Guardrails Denylisting Partition Keys Diagnostic events via CQL, not just JMX CQLSH Auth support for LDAP, Kerberos and more Lots of new, pluggable extension points Also, celebrate our open source community with highlights from the 2022 Apache Cassandra World Party and a look ahead to Cassandra 5.0!

1. Cedrick Lunven
Director of developer Advocacy
Top 10 present and future
innovations in the NoSQL
Cassandra ecosystem

2. Cédrick
Lunven
Developer Advocates, Events, Community, Partners
2
@clunven
Directeur Developer Relations
➢ Speaker
➢ Streamer
➢ Author
➢ Training
➢ Community Manager
➢ Application developer
➢ Technical Architect
➢ Presales
➢ Support

3. Agenda
1. Why Cassandra
2. Top 10 innovations in the Cassandra Ecosystem
2.1. Cassandra 4.1 - CEP-03 = System-wide Guardrails
2.2. Cassandra 4.1 - CEP-13 = Denylisting Partition Keys
2.3. Cassandra 4.1 - CEP-18 = Pluggable Extension Points
2.4. Cassandra 4.2 - CEP-07 = Storage Indexed Storage
2.5. Cassandra 4.2 - CEP-19 = Tries Memtables
2.6. Cassandra 4.2 - CEP-21 = Transactional Cluster MetaData
2.7. Cassandra 4.2 - CEP-20 = Dynamic Data Masking
2.8. Cassandra 4.2 - CEP-15 = Acid Transaction
2.9. Communicate with any application using Stargate
2.10. Deploy Cassandra in Kubernetes
3. Resources
3

4. Why Cassandra ?
4

5. Relational Databases are Versatile
5
Fast Queries
“Customer-facing”
High number of transactions
Usually Hot / Live Data
High SLA Requirements
(Response Time / Availability)
OLTP: Online Transaction Processing OLAP: Online Analytical Processing
Complex Queries
Historical
High volume of data
Often “Cold Data”
Used by / for Analytics
Volume
of Data
Response
Time

6. Relational Databases have limited scalability
6
They were designed to run on a single machine
●
●
●

7. Apache Cassandra = NoSQL Distributed Decentralised DBMS
7
NODE
NODE
NODE
NODE
NODE NODE
NODE
1 Installation = 1 NODE
✔ Capacity = ~ 2-4TB
✔ Throughput = LOTS Tx/sec/core
Communication:
✔ Gossiping
DataCenter | Ring

8. Distributed ?
8
• Geographic Distribution • Hybrid-Cloud and Multi-Cloud
On-premise

9. Always On
Every second of downtime
translates into lost revenue
High Availability
Apache
Cassandra
Built as a
Technical
Necessity
Linear Scalability
of Fortune 100
companies
have adopted
90%
Hyper-Scalability
Millions of operations per day,
hour, or second
Faster Pace
Every millisecond of latency
has consequence
Low Latency
Data Everywhere
On-premises, hybrid, multi-cloud,
centralized, or edge
Global Distribution

10. Use Cases
10
High Throughput
High Volume
Heavy Writes
Heavy Reads
Event Streaming Log Analytics
Internet of Things Other Time Series
Mission-Critical
No Data Loss
Always-on
Scalability
Availability
Distributed
Cloud-native
Caching Pricing
Market Data Inventory
Banking Retail
Tracking /
Logistics
Customer
Experience
API Layer Hybrid-cloud
Enterprise Data
Layer
Multi-cloud
Modern Cloud
Applications
Global Presence
Workload Mobility
Compliance /
GDPR

11. Cassandra 4.1 (2022)
● CEP-03 = System-wide Guardrails
● CEP-13 = Denylisting Partition Keys
● CEP-18 = Pluggable Extension Points
11

12. Cassandra 4.0 (2021)
Is a big Deal !
12
● Wait for 6 years
● Production Ready day 1
● Features
○ 25% faster
○ Faster Big Clusters
○ Incremental Repairs
○ Virtual Tables
○ Transient Replicas

13. Cassandra 4.1 - What’s in it?
● Themes
● Major yearly release
● Usability
● Security
● Pluggability
● Features
● Configuration Improvements
● System-wide Guardrails
● Denylisting Partition Keys
● Pluggable Extension Points
● QA building blocks
13

14. Improved Configuration
14
● Standard and Intuitive names
○ noun_verb
● Units in values

15. System-wide Guardrails (CEP-3)
● Hard and soft limits on magnitudes
● Disabling features entirely
● Disallowing specific configuration values
● Administrative users exempted
● Typically checked at the CQL layer
● Based on work in Astra
15
https://cassandra.apache.org/_/blog/Apache-Cassandra-4.1-Features-Guardrails-Framework.html

16. Cassandra 4.1 - Disabling Features
● Example: ALLOW FILTERING
● Configure in cassandra.yaml :
● Verify setting in cqlsh:
● Developer experience:
16

17. Cassandra 4.1 - Hard and Soft Limits
● Example: ALLOW FILTERING
● Configure in cassandra.yaml :
● Developer experience (soft limit aka warning):
17

18. Denylisting Partition Keys (CEP-13)
18
https://cassandra.apache.org/_/blog/Apache-Cassandra-4.1-Denylisting-Partitions.html
● Overloaded partitions break clusters
○ compactions, streaming, GC, etc
○ Bad data modeling choices
○ Unintended usage or attacks
● The solution: operators can identify
partition keys for which queries will be
disallowed overloaded keys

19. https://unsplash.com/@nevenkrcmarek
Pluggable extension points
● Valuable mechanism to add new features
without disrupting the core
○ Internal APIs and code restructuring
● Pluggable storage (memtables)
○ Next: SSTables
● Pluggable network encryption
○ External key providers
● Pluggable authentication
○ Extend cqlsh via Python modules
● External schema storage
○ etcd for Kubernetes environments
19

20. Updating to Cassandra 4.1
20

21. Upgrading to 4.1
● In place upgrade from 4.0
● No application changes
● Simple steps, same as last time
● 1. Verify your software versions
● 2. Perform a cluster-wide snapshot
● 3. Upgrade the first node and verify
● 4. Continue to each node in your
cluster
21
https://foojay.io/today/have-you-upgraded-to-cassandra-4-0/

22. If you need help preparing for an upgrade to 4.1
● For a limited time — until July 31, 2022 — our award-winning team of Apache Cassandra™
contributors are available to help evaluate the health of your clusters, including conducting a
comprehensive health check, at a reduced price of $200 USD a month.*
● This special offer includes:
● Best practices, performance and security improvements, plus SLA achievement
● Expert-led health check of your Apache Cassandra environment
● On-going support for 1 year via DataStax Luna
● Expertise and peace of mind for your team
● How can you learn more and request this offer?
https://www.datastax.com/lp/luna-apache-cassandra
22

23. Cassandra 4.2 (2023)
● CEP-07 = Storage Attached Index
● CEP-19 = Tries Memtables
● CEP-21 = Transactional Cluster MetaData
● CEP-20 = Dynamic Data Masking
● CEP-15 = Acid Transaction
23

24. Storage Attached Index
24
Intended to replace both 2i and SASI

25. Trie Memtables (CEP-19)
25

26. Transactional Cluster MetaData
26

27. ACID Transactions (CEP-15)
27

28. Cassandra Relationship With Developers
28
Easy Hard
● Scale
● Resilience
● Distribution
● Atomicity
● Serialized changes
● Complicated State
Built-in Data Modeling
& Code

29. Accord
29
Node 1
Node 4 Node 2
Node 3
● Every node has a Reorder Buffer
● Clock skew is cool
● Leaderless timestamp protocol
● Fast Path Electorates: Fault tolerance
● TL;DR One Round Trip - ish
Reorder
Buffer
Reorder
Buffer
Reorder
Buffer
Reorder
Buffer
Good for Cassandra
● Leaderless
● Scales like Cassandra
● Failure modes match

30. More Tools
● Communicate with any application using Stargate
● Deploy Cassandra in Kubernetes
30

31. Stargate Overview
An open source API framework for data
Stargate makes it easy to use a
database for any application workload
by adding plugin support for new APIs,
data types, and access methods
MICROSERVICES
DEVELOPERS
31

32. Astra DB
gRPC
CQL
GraphQL Document
API
Data
API
Cassandra
3.x
Cassandra
4.x DSE 6.x
API Extensions and Persistence Extensions
32

33. Stargate
Cassandra Query
Language
GraphQL REST Document
SQL like Table Model
Structured Data
Key-Value Data
Strong Types
Minimal query overhead
Hierarchy of
types and fields
Structured Data
Key-Value Data
Low query overhead
Row based
Structured Data
Key-Value Data
Weaker Types
High query overhead
JSON Documents
Semi-Structured Data
Weaker Types
High query overhead
Drivers Open API
More Performant More Flexible
gRPC
Structured Data (CQL)
Lighter weight
Native driver alternative
Low query overhead
33

34. Connecting to your cluster (Before)
NODE
NODE
NODE
NODE
NODE NODE
NODE
developers
Apps
CQL
CQL
CQL
CQL
CQL
Drivers
CQL
CQL
34

35. Connecting to your cluster (with Stargates)
NODE
NODE
NODE
NODE
NODE NODE
NODE
developers
Apps
SDK
CQL
CQL
CQL
CQL
CQL
Stargate
Stargate
Stargate
CQL
CQL
CQL
CQL
CQL
Load
Balancer
(HTTP)
35

36. + =
36

37. Apache
Cassandra®
Cass-Operator
37

38. Apache
Cassandra®
Cass-Operator
Metrics
Collector
38

39. Apache
Cassandra®
Cass-Operator
Cassandra
Medusa
(backup/restore)
Metrics
Collector
📁S3, GCP,...
Repear
(repair)
39

40. Apache
Cassandra®
Cass-Operator
Cassandra
Medusa
(backup/restore)
Metrics
Collector
📁S3, GCP,...
Repear
(repair)
Stargate

41. Resources
41

42. Cassandra Community Events
42
● 10/11 - London
● 10/13 - Amsterdam
● 11/08 - Hanoi
● 11/10 - Jakarta
● 11/10 - Santa Clara
● 11/10 - Houston
● 11/10 - Seattle
● 11/15 - Singapore
Every
Wednesday
12pm ET

43. Cassandra Community Resources
Planet Cassandra is back!
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvP-AXuCr
-naAeEccCfKwUA
43
Developer Community
https://www.datastax.com/dev/community

44. Ecosystem Updates
● Try out 4.1 features
including guardrails
44
Coming soon:
● Cassandra 4.1 support
● Stargate 2.0 release
● New Docs API
● More APIs
Coming soon:
● Cassandra 4.1 support
● K8ssandra Operator v1.2

45. Cassandra: The Definitive Guide, Revised Third Edition
45
https://www.datastax.com/resources/ebook/oreilly-cassandra-the-definitive-guide

46. Questions
46

47. Thank You!
47
@clunven