Instaclustr’s Managed Cadence® offering was released to General Availability in early April. Since that time, we’ve been busy adding additional features as well as supporting early customers who are now running multiple Cadence clusters in production. This blog provides a run down on the new features added over the last few months.

Originally developed and open sourced by Uber, Cadence is a workflow engine that greatly simplifies the development of complex long-running automated business processes at scale. The solution is particularly suited for use in microservices-based architectures where multiple service calls must be coordinated over time to achieve a business outcome. Due to its unique capabilities, Cadence is rapidly gaining popularity among global organizations operating at the largest scales. A detailed explainer video on Instaclustr Managed Cadence is available here.

Since GA, we’ve been working to make our Managed Cadence easy to use for simple use cases in addition to providing access to some of the more advanced features of Cadence.

Key new features include:

• Packaged Solution provisioning including Advanced Visibility Support: This feature allows Cadence and the Apache Cassandra®, Apache Kafka®, and OpenSearch® clusters on which it depends to be provisioned through a single set of forms. We have pre-defined sizing for these clusters with matched capacity that will suit many use cases with development and two production sizes available.

• Cadence Archival Support: Cadence Archival provides the ability for Cadence workflow history to be archived to S3 but still be accessible through the Cadence interfaces. Instaclustr’s Cadence Archival support automates the configuration of Cadence Archival to use a customer-owned S3 bucket.

• gRPC Support: With the Cadence Go client now using gRPC by default and gRPC support in the Java client expected in the next few weeks, Instaclustr has enabled gRPC connections to Managed Cadence on the Instaclustr platform. 

• Automated Customer Initiated Resize for Cadence: Customer Initiated Resize is a feature available across all Instaclustr offerings that allows customers to initiate a vertical resize of their cluster via our console, API, or Terraform provider. It fully automates the execution of the resize while orchestrating actions to ensure zero downtime.
• Bundled Use Only Pricing: When using Instaclustr Managed Apache Cassandra, Apache Kafka, and OpenSearch clusters entirely for the purpose of supporting Cadence, customers can opt-in to Bundled Use Only pricing which provides a 25% discount for Run In Instaclustr Account customers (where pricing includes cloud provider charges), and a 50% discount for Run In Your Own Account customers (management fees only).

These features add to the base features of Instaclustr Managed Cadence that have been available since GA:

• 99.95% availability SLAs for Cadence operations, measured by synthetic transaction monitoring, and including Cadence and underlying data infrastructure components
• Fully automated provisioning of Cadence, including required Apache Cassandra, Apache Kafka, and OpenSearch clusters on the Instaclustr Platform
• Discounted pricing for Apache Cassandra, Apache Kafka, and OpenSearch clusters used solely to support Managed Cadence
• Vertical and horizontal scaling through the Instaclustr’s Console, API, or Terraform provider
• Availability on AWS, Azure, GCP, or running in private infrastructure (including on-prem)
• 24x7x365 monitoring and expert support
• SOC 2 certified security

Instaclustr Managed Cadence is now available for production usage on AWS, GCP, and Azure, or for customers to run on their own cloud or on-prem infrastructure. Try Instaclustr Managed Cadence by signing up via the Instaclustr console, or contact the Instaclustr Sales team for more information.