Managed Apache Cassandra on AWS
Effortlessly deploy, run, and scale the world’s most powerful NoSQL database on AWS.
Apache Cassandra—The Most Popular NoSQL Database
We provide a fully managed service for your Apache Cassandra clusters hosted on AWS. If you are after high throughput and cost-effective deployment, running your Cassandra cluster on Amazon Web Services (AWS) can help you achieve these objectives.
Running Cassandra on AWS
As an Instaclustr customer, you can run Managed Cassandra from within an AWS account owned by Instaclustr. This is an all-inclusive option available as part of our managed service, providing assurance that all the elements that could impact the availability of the managed service are within Instaclustr’s control.
Alternatively, if you are looking at running in your own AWS account, get in touch with our Sales team.
Create a Cassandra Cluster on AWS
You can get started with creating and deploying a Cassandra cluster on AWS in minutes, either by logging in from the AWS Marketplace or signing up on the Instaclustr Management Console.
Create a cluster by logging in from AWS Marketplace.
Create a cluster by signing up directly on the Instaclustr Management Console.
Best Practices for Running Cassandra on AWS
Both Amazon EC2 and Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) provide secure and resizable storage in the AWS Cloud. By deploying Apache Cassandra on AWS, you can scale capacity as your needs grow. Learn more.
AWS is built around the concept of region and availability zones. It is recommended to select the same region for your data and application when building a Cassandra cluster. This will minimize the read/write latency between your application and the Cassandra cluster. However, since Cassandra has a master-less architecture in which all nodes play an identical role with no single point of failure, it is beneficial to spread Cassandra nodes across multiple availability zones (AZs) within the same region to enable high availability (protecting your business application from AZ failures). Instaclustr’s Managed Platform automatically distributes nodes across multiples AZs and configures them for maximum availability.
Additionally, you can secure your data at rest by encrypting the disks with an AWS KMS key. This will encrypt both your EBS volumes and S3 backups, while also protecting your data from trouble.
AWS-Lambda and Cassandra Managed Service
AWS-Lambda offers a simple way to execute a small piece of stateless code, on-demand and without the need to provision and deploy any servers. AWS Lambda is often combined with an AWS API gateway where AWS Lambda acts as the execution layer and the AWS API gateway acts as the interfacing layer following the REST architecture.
If interested in learning more, our presentation will walk you through a POC that combines AWS Lambda, an API Gateway, and the Instaclustr Apache Cassandra Managed Service to power a simple REST API-based application.
Here is our blog on AWS Lambda with managed Cassandra. The post focuses on developing a POC at next-to-no cost. We also show how to build a minimalistic REST API with Cassandra as the backend storage.
Benchmarking Multi-Data Center Cassandra on AWS
We conducted extensive benchmarking to compare performance between a single data center deployment, where Spark and Cassandra are collocated, versus a two data center deployment where Cassandra is mirrored across two data centers with Spark running only in the second data center. The idea behind a two data center deployment is to use the first data center exclusively to serve Cassandra reads/writes with no performance overhead due to Spark, while using the second data center to do analytics jobs with Spark. Read our two-part blog series to understand these benchmarking results.
Dynamic Resizing of Apache Cassandra on AWS
Instaclustr’s dynamic resizing capability allows you to vertically scale up or down the processing capacity of each node in a Cassandra cluster—online, in minutes, and with the click of a couple of buttons or an API call.
We have been able to deliver this capability by building on the flexibility of the AWS environment, via the sophisticated provisioning and monitoring capability of Instaclustr’ Managed Service Platform and the inherent capability of Apache Cassandra to handle nodes being taken offline for maintenance without skipping a beat.
