• Technical
What’s New: October 2015

The last month or has seen a raft of new features helping to ensure that Instaclustr is the best service possible for our customers. Here’s a round of what we’ve released:

  • Spark Preview Release: Apache Spark and Cassandra together from one, trusted provider. See https://www.instaclustr.com/managed-apache-spark-on-cassandra/ for the details on this.
  • New AWS EBS Backed Instance Types: Up to 30% price performance improvement over existing offerings. https://www.instaclustr.com/cassandra-on-aws-ebs-infrastructure/
  • Instaclustr-managed NTP services: Ensure the most reliable time synchronization for the most reliable Cassandra experience. https://www.instaclustr.com/apache-cassandra-synchronization/
  • Provisioning API: Now in limited release, our provisioning API can allow you to automatically create Instaclustr-managed clusters. We expect the typical use cases to be as part of a continuous integration/automated testing process that provisions a complete environment. Contact [email protected] if you are interested in using this.
  • Creation of cluster with private IP as broadcast address: For most customers using AWS VPC peering, their clusters are configured to broadcast private, rather than public, IP addresses. This previously required manually intervention from our support team after the cluster had been provisioned. It can now be specified as an option on our console for cluster creation.
  • Two-factor confirmation for cluster delete: It is now possible to specify through the Instaclustr console that a second authorisation (via email or phone) is required before a cluster is deleted. This feature is designed to prevent accidental or malicious deletion of clusters by authorised users. We highly recommend that all customers running production clusters enable this feature to provide additional safeguards for their cluster.

During October we commenced architectural work to allow us to perform online upgrades to our console application. Once complete, this will remove the downtime currently associated with our upgrade and maintenance releases.