• Technical
Instaclustr Engineering Year in Review

This year has been another massive step forward for Instaclustr Engineering. In addition to the many important new features added to our product set, working with the team you can really feel the benefits of the experience we’ve accumulated and the maturing of our processes.

On the technical operations side, we continue to hear that customers are delighted with the responsiveness and expertise of our customers service. We now have mature, battle-tested processes for the full range of Cassandra administrative operations from adding to replacing nodes through to live data center migrations and dealing with tricky situations that arise. This experience benefits both our managed service and support customers and all of this learning has happened through continual operation of our many customers in production.

In consulting, we’ve grown our practice from the occasional consulting gig for existing managed service customers to several full time consultants. We’re working with customers ranging from innovative startups through to some of the largest, most advanced tech companies in the world. We’ve proven the value of the model of bringing the real operational experience from our managed service to consulting customers and also learnt valuable lessons from being more involved in the process of developing application in Cassandra.

Our product development team has also matured. We have bedded in a continuous release process and have re-architected several components of our system for high-availability. This allows us to release new features and fixes multiple times a week without any noticeable downtime on our management systems (and no downtime at all on customers clusters). We also introduced an open source rotation scheme, formalising our level of commitment to open source development and ensure all our engineers gain deep exposure to the open source projects we use.

Through all of this, we’ve been able to release a continual stream of significant new features. Some of the highlights are:

I think that’s a pretty productive year by any standard and a lot of extra value for our customers. Expect bigger and better things next year as we ramp our engineering capacity following our recent investment round. In particular, I’m excited about plans to further increase our participation in the Cassandra project, continue to mature our managed service to meet the needs of an even broader range of enterprise customers and expand our offerings with complementary technologies.

One of the best things about working with Instaclustr is seeing the awesome things our customers build on top of our services. I’m really excited to see what we end up building and running together in the coming year!