Instaclustr recently announced that we will be maintaining a new fork of the Cassandra Lucene Index plug in. This blog post provides some background on that decision, Instaclustr’s support for the Lucene Index and our plans for maintaining the fork.

Our main motivation behind creating this fork was to allow us to do a better job of supporting our customers who use the Lucene Index. We have provided the Lucene index as an option for Apache Cassandra on the Instaclustr Managed Platform since January 2017 and we will continue to provide it as a fully supported option for the foreseeable future. In addition, we will also provide support for use of the Lucene Index for customers with Enterprise Support contracts for Apache Cassandra. In both cases “support” means we will assist our customers with bug fixes, troubleshooting and workarounds for any issues they find in the use of the plugin. We also have several consultants with experience implementing the Lucene Index in client applications, for when more in depth issues arise.

Forking an OSS project is not a step that we take lightly. We have been following the Lucene index closely since implementation in our managed service, and over the past year have been aware of the lack of activity on the project since late 2017. We’ve made minor updates to continue support for new releases of 3.11, but as time goes on we’ve realised that we’ll need to devote more attention to the plugin to continue supporting it through 3.11 and 4.0. So we contacted the original developers (https://www.stratio.com/) to confirm that they did not plan to continue maintenance and advised them that if so, we would start maintaining a public fork. We felt that keeping this project alive was the right thing to do as (a) we have support and managed service customers using this component and (b) it is an important and well-used open source alternative to proprietary technologies in this space. I’ll take this opportunity to publicly acknowledge and thank Stratio for their great work in developing and open sourcing this technology.

So, what are our plans for the Lucene Index now that we have forked it? We don’t have any near-term plans for major enhancements but will be doing the work required to keep the plug-in a healthy open source project:

• We will be making regular releases with the updates required for the plug-in to work with new Cassandra releases (including Cassandra 4.0 when that gets closer to release).
• Any bug fixes that we make to support our customers will be published to the public repo and released.
• We will review, and where appropriate, commit any community contributions to the project. We are happy to induct contributors into the project and take on committers from the community.

We may make other enhancements and bug fixes as part of our general contribution to the Apache Cassandra community but those will play out over time rather than making any promises at this stage.

If you have any questions about this announcement then please feel free to contact me directly at [email protected] or leave a comment on this blog post.