# What’s New: October 2015 [Blog](/blog/)>[Technical](/blog/category/technical/)>What’s New: October 2015 What’s New: October 2015 ======================== November 05, 2015 | By [ Ben Slater](https://www.instaclustr.com/blog/author/bens/) [ ](https://x.com/intent/tweet?text=What%E2%80%99s%20New:%20October%202015&url=https://www.instaclustr.com/blog/whats-new-october-2015/) [ ](https://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&url=https://www.instaclustr.com/blog/whats-new-october-2015/&title=&summary=What%E2%80%99s%20New:%20October%202015&source=) 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 for the details on this. - **New AWS EBS Backed Instance Types:** Up to 30% price performance improvement over existing offerings. https://www.instaclustr.com/blog/cassandra-on-aws-ebs-infrastructure/ - **Instaclustr-managed NTP services:** Ensure the most reliable time synchronization for the most reliable Cassandra experience. - **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 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. ### About the author **[Ben Slater](https://www.instaclustr.com/blog/author/bens/)** | Chief Product Officer Chief Product Officer, charged with steering Instaclustr’s development roadmap and overseeing the product engineering, production support, open source, and consulting teams. ![mail icon]()#### Get the latest articles for open sourceIn your inbox Sign up now ### Related content [ Zero Downtime Migration to Instaclustr Yes, we can migrate existing Cassandra clusters to Instaclustr without any downtime. Here's what to expect from the process... ](https://www.instaclustr.com/blog/zero-downtime-migration-to-instaclustr/) [ Workflow Comparison: Uber Cadence vs Netflix Conductor When choosing what’s right for your company’s opensource workflow needs it is important to know the difference and similarities ... ](https://www.instaclustr.com/blog/workflow-comparison-uber-cadence-vs-netflix-conductor/) [ Will Your Cassandra Database Project Succeed?: The New Stack Open source Apache Cassandra® continues to stand out as an enterprise-proven solution for organizations seeking high availability... ](https://www.instaclustr.com/blog/will-your-cassandra-database-project-succeed-the-new-stack/) ×Sign upto ourNewsletter -----------------------