Apache Cassandra: Our original adventure in open source

When we founded Instaclustr over a decade ago, we began with a single open source project: Apache Cassandra.

Since then we have expanded into other Apache Software Foundation (ASF)-sponsored projects like Apache Kafka®, Kafka® Connect, and Apache ZooKeeper™. But Cassandra has always remained a core part of the Instaclustr Managed Platform.

Why Cassandra? Simply put, there just wasn’t anything like it being developed at the time—or since.

Cassandra’s ability to handle incredible amounts of data across multiple commodity servers, high availability, fault tolerance, and linear scalability offered a way to fundamentally change how people managed NoSQL databases. Its distributed architecture meant that there wasn’t a single point of failure, and being run in the Cassandra Query Language (CQL)—closely related to SQL—made it easier for developers to quickly adapt to using CQL.

But even more so than its incredible architecture was the ASF and the open source community backing this project. We wanted to be an integral part of collaborating and growing Cassandra into the NoSQL powerhouse it is today and maintain that dynamism well into the future.

Here’s how Instaclustr is contributing to the lasting success of Apache Cassandra.

Powering the Cassandra process

As part of our multi-year Silver Sponsorship of the Apache Software Foundation, we’re excited to announce that Instaclustr has donated instances to provide committers with additional compute capability inside the Apache Software Foundation infrastructure.

With the infrastructure now set up, this will provide Cassandra project committers with significant extra capacity to ci-cassandra.apache.org:

  1. Having more executors available means that build times are shortened and the development feedback-loop is faster, increasing overall Cassandra progress
  2. In addition, having more executors will add both stability and improved throughput of CI of the community
  3. NetApp Instaclustr now runs 60 of the total 140 executors–roughly 42% of the Continuous Integration (CI) infrastructure for this project–showing our firm commitment to the project and the wider community.

Other recent open source contributions

The AWS instances are not the only way Instaclustr has been contributing to the ongoing success of the Apache Cassandra project. Here’s a breakdown of some of our most recent contributions.

  • CEP-24: Cassandra password validator and generator
    • Although users have always had the ability to create whatever password they wanted in Cassandra, this inadvertently led to security vulnerabilities; while organizations may have internal policies for creating strong passwords, there was no way to enforce these standards.
    • With the development of CEP-24, users now have robust, configurable password policies with built-in enforcement and convenient password generation capabilities.
  • Cassandra 5 support for Go Driver
    • Apache Cassandra community have adopted the original gocql driver which is now part of the Cassandra project. We have been supporting this transition, and we are collaborating with upstream in order to support Cassandra 5 as well.
  • Debezium/Cassandra 5
    • Debezium is an open source distributed, low-latency, data streaming platform for change data capture (CDC). We have been adding support for Debezium and Cassandra 5, as well as continuing to support older Cassandra releases.

Proudly maintaining support for the ASF, Cassandra, and the open source community

Open source has been our mission since Day One at Instaclustr, and we continue to offer nothing but 100% open source solutions more than a decade later.

By donating AWS instances to the Apache Software Foundation, we’re excited to see what Cassandra project committers will do with this extra computing power and how Apache Cassandra will maintain its edge as the world’s leading NoSQL database. But most importantly, we’re proud to be a continuing partner of the ASF and a leader in community engagement and open source development.

For more details about the latest open source contributions from Instaclustr, check out: