DataStax Releases K8ssandra – The Latest Production-Ready Platform for Running Apache Cassandra on Kubernetes

Jan. 11, 2021, 9:15 p.m.

TL;DR

K8ssandra, an open source distribution of Apache Cassandra on Kubernetes, was released by DataStax recently. The production-ready platform was launched at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America. K8ssandra aims to help with improving data scalability and automate certain operational tasks like repairs, backup, and monitoring. It is deployed using Helm and includes some projects that are considered essential for automating Cassandra, including Cass-operator, Cassandra Reaper, and Cassandra Medusa.

K8ssandra allows scaling of this data elastically as well as observing it with tools like Prometheus and Grafana

Key Facts

1
“K8ssandra will help make data cloud-native," said Sam Ramji, Chief Strategy Officer at DataStax.
2
Cassandra acts as an Open Source distributed data source for Kubernetes. K8ssandra will help in Open Source distribution of Cassandra to support stateful workloads on Kubernetes.
3
Running a database at scale was a major challenge for Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) which was taken care of by Cassandra. Organizations were looking for ways to employ Cassandra on Kubernetes and run databases at scale. K8ssandra allows SREs to set up and operate Cassandra clusters using best practices in Kubernetes. It includes elastic scaling of data and auto-healing features.
4
K8ssandra includes, and allows observing data with, Prometheus and Grafana. Prometheus provides pre-built and collected metrics. Grafana offers pre-configured dashboards, which enables observability.
5
Automation tools include Cass-operator, which acts as a translation layer between the control plane of Kubernetes and Cassandra cluster operations; Cassandra Reaper for managing maintenance tasks and repairs; and Cassandra Medusa which is a backup and restore tool.

Details

Site Reliability Engineers and DevOps Engineers are increasingly turning towards Kubernetes to manage their data. But data scalability on these cloud service platforms was a major challenge they faced. Cassandra was created to overcome this challenge and run data at scale. K8ssandra was developed to make this data Cloud Native.

While Cassandra provides an Open Source distributed datastore for Kubernetes, K8ssandra allows scaling of this data elastically as well as observing it with tools like Prometheus and Grafana. K8ssandra includes auto-healing features that help automate maintenance, repair, and backup tasks with the help of its inbuilt automation tools.

It’s a distribution of known-good components that work well together on Kubernetes, and it’s a place for SREs to share operational wisdom.
Sam Ramji
Chief Strategy Officer, DataStax