This is the end on of my first official week at Instaclustr and it’s been a great start. I’ve spent the week getting to know the fantastic team we have here, getting an understanding of our architecture and planning for the future, including reviewing our product roadmap.

What we provide at Instaclustr is a fully managed service for Cassandra. This is always going to include a human support aspect but for reliability, efficiency and responsiveness our aim is for as much as the service provision as possible to be automated (including automated self service). The Instaclustr engineering team is responsible for building these automated components of the service and there are four main components to the architecture we build and maintain:

• an automated provisioning (and billing) system;
• a system for monitoring provisioned Cassandra nodes;
• an automated system for managing and maintaining Cassandra nodes; and
• a set of known-good Cassandra node configurations for the environments and virtual machine types that we support.

One of the great things about our architecture is that customer Cassandra nodes are very loosely coupled to the other parts of the system. The availability of your Cassandra instance depends on the underlying cloud infrastructure, OS and the Cassandra instance running on your node but not on any of the components of the Instaclustr system. Of course, our monitoring and management services are working to protect the reliability and performance of your nodes.

Our product roadmap over the next few months has a real focus on providing greater visibility for customers of the steps we are taking to protect the reliability of your Cassandra cluster as well as providing more tools for you to administer and tune your cluster safely and quickly.

Stay tuned for more information on these new features in coming weeks. If you’re a current or prospective customer and have feature you would like to see then let me know via email at [email protected] or twitter @slater_ben.