Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder
As Chief Technology Officer and Co-founder at Instaclustr, Ben sets the technical direction for the company. Ben is located in our California office and is active in the Apache Cassandra community.
Prior to Instaclustr, Ben had been working as an independent consultant developing NoSQL solutions for enterprises and was running a high-tech cryptographic and cybersecurity formal testing laboratory at BAE Systems and Stratsec.
Friday 15th January 2021
Yesterday, Elastic announced they would moving their “Apache 2.0-licensed source code in Elasticsearch and Kibana to be dual licensed under Server Side Public License (SSPL) and the Elastic License” (read their full announcement here). This change means that components of Elasticsearch or Kibana in subsequent versions (7.11 and onwards) are no longer under an OSI-approved […]
Read moreTuesday 21st July 2020
The beta release of Apache Cassandra 4.0 is finally here, it’s been two years in the making. We’ve had a preview release available to customers since March for testing. A wide range of improvements have been made. Stability The explicit goal of this release has been to be “the most stable major release ever” to […]
Read moreTuesday 10th March 2020
Apache Cassandra 4.0 brings about a long awaited feature for tracking and logging database user activity. Primarily aimed at providing a robust set of audit capabilities allowing operators of Cassandra to meet external compliance obligations, it brings yet another enterprise feature into the database. Combining work for the full query log capability, the audit log […]
Read moreSunday 8th March 2020
Enterprises are now overloaded with choice when it comes to the breadth of their technology stack possibilities. One of the most important is deciding whether to move forward with open source or proprietary solutions (whether deployed in the cloud or or-prem). It’s a critical decision shaping the immediate and long-term future of any business’ technology […]
Read moreFriday 14th February 2020
In this series of blog posts, we’ll take a meandering tour of some of the important changes, cool features, and nice ergonomics that are coming with Apache Cassandra 4.0. In part 1 we focussed on Cassandra 4.0 stability and testing, and Part 2 around virtual tables. In this part we will learn about Netty Transport Framework […]
Read moreTuesday 4th February 2020
The last major version release of Apache Cassandra was 3.11.0 and that was more than 2 years ago in 2017. So what has the Cassandra developer community been doing over the last 2 years? Well let me tell you, it’s good real good. It’s Apache Cassandra 4.0! It’s also close, and with the release of […]
Read moreWednesday 8th January 2020
The last major version release of Apache Cassandra was 3.11.0 and that was more than 2 years ago in 2017. So what has the Cassandra developer community been doing over the last 2 years? Well let me tell you, it’s good, real good. It’s Apache Cassandra 4.0! The final release is not here as yet, […]
Read moreFriday 7th December 2018
Last week, 11 intrepid team members from Instaclustr traveled from the corners of the world to brave 140+ hours in Las Vegas for AWS re:Invent, Amazon’s flagship conference for AWS and one of the biggest cloud conferences in the world. Over the course of the five days we interacted spoke with over 2000 attendees, were […]
Read moreThursday 13th September 2018
As Kubernetes becomes the de facto for container orchestration, more and more developers (and enterprises) want to run Apache Cassandra on Kubernetes. It’s easy to get started with this – especially considering the capabilities that Kubernetes’ StatefulSets bring to the table. Kubernetes, though, certainly has room to improve when it comes to storing data in-state […]
Read moreThursday 19th October 2017
NGCC Summary The Next Generation Cassandra Conference (NGCC) is an annual meeting of developers, contributors, committers, driver authors and anyone interested in the development of Apache Cassandra where they can all get together and talk about the technical and community direction of the Cassandra project. This year the NGCC was held in San Antonio, Texas. […]
Read moreThursday 9th February 2017
Overview As part of our commitment to contributing back to the Apache Cassandra open source project and the wider community we are always looking for ways we can foster knowledge sharing and improve usability of Cassandra itself. One of the ways we have done so previously was to open up our internal builds and versions […]
Read moreTuesday 31st January 2017
Introduction To state the obvious, we here at Instaclustr are massive fans of Apache Cassandra. We have built our company and our managed service around this database technology and the awesomeness of its capability. There are a lot of well documented use cases and amazing companies providing examples of how they are using open source […]
Read moreTuesday 7th June 2016
Overview Apache Cassandra 3.0 introduces a new feature called materialized views. Materialized views behave like they do in other database systems, you create a table that is populated by the results of a query. Cassandra also keeps the materialized view up to date based on the data you insert into the base table. Whilst the […]
Read moreWednesday 26th November 2014
Background In October 2014 RBA Governor Glenn Stevens announced that he wanted Australian banks to work together and modernise the nation’s payment systems to keep pace with technological innovations. He issued an ultimatum – build a better payments system or we will make you. Mr. Stevens then reminded Australia’s banks that other comparable countries had […]
Read moreThursday 6th November 2014
Streaming From Backups – Reducing Cluster Load When Adding Nodes Speaker: Ben Bromhead, Co-Founder & Chief Technical Officer at Instaclustr One of the difficulties with scaling your cluster to cope with additional traffic is the very act of adding capacity increases the load on the cluster, often at a time when your cluster is already […]
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