Visual Guide to Apache Kafka Diskless Topics & Cloud Costs

A visual guide to Apache Kafka® Diskless Topics: Finding Zen in the cloud  I’ve been tracking the progress of Apache Kafka “Diskless Topics” for a while now. It’s a topic that sparks curiosity—mostly because the name itself sounds like an oxymoron. How can a topic be diskless? Where does the data go?  With the recent...

Apache Cassandra® 5.0: Improving performance with Unified Compaction Strategy

Introduction Unified Compaction Strategy (UCS), introduced in Apache Cassandra 5.0, is a versatile compaction framework that not only unifies the benefits of Size-Tiered (STCS) and Leveled (LCS) Compaction Strategies, but also introduces new capabilities like shard parallelism, density-aware SSTable organization, and safer incremental compaction, all of which deliver more predictable performance at scale. By utilizing...

Under the hood: Engineering faster ClickHouse® performance 

Speed matters in data analytics. When you are processing billions of rows, even small performance improvements compound into massive time and cost savings. For ClickHouse 25.10, I contributed three patches that push the boundaries of query performance and reliability—particularly for text search and data ingestion operations that are ubiquitous in modern data workloads.  Merged contributions ...

IBM, Confluent Acquisition: What it means for your data strategy

Building the AI Cluster Health Summary: From raw metrics to clear signals

Why we built it  NetApp Instaclustr is constantly monitoring the health of all clusters on the platform and alerts the Instaclustr Support team as potential issues arise. However, it is reassuring to review the state of your cluster health, so Instaclustr provides access to hundreds of metrics within the console for each managed cluster. Even...

The end of neutrality? Navigating the consolidation of the modern data stack

We are witnessing a profound shift in the technology landscape. While recent headlines have focused heavily on IBM’s major acquisition of DataStax and the $11 billion agreement to acquire Confluent, we view these moves as a part of a much broader trend. The era of the fragmented, best-of-breed data stack is giving way to an...

Exploring the key features of Cassandra® 5.0

Apache Cassandra has become one of the most broadly adopted distributed databases for large-scale, highly available applications since its launch as an open source project in 2008. The 5.0 release in September 2024 represents the most substantial advancement to the project since 4.0 released in July 2021. Multiple customers (and our own internal Cassandra use...

Introducing AI Cluster Health: Smarter monitoring made simple

Turn complex metrics into clear, insights with AI-powered health indicators—now available in the NetApp Instaclustr console. Interpreting your cluster metrics shouldn’t require deep technical expertise. The new Instaclustr AI Cluster Health page makes it easy for anyone to understand the state of their cluster at a glance, turning complex data into clear, actionable insights. Until...