Apache Cassandra Changelog #6 | April 2021

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Our monthly roundup of key activities and knowledge to keep the community informed.

Release Notes

Released

A blocking issue was found in beta-2 which has delayed the release of rc-1. Also during rc-1 evaluation, some concerns were raised about the contents of the source distribution, but work to resolve that got underway quickly and is ready to commit.

For the latest status on Cassandra 4.0 GA, please check the Jira board (ASF login required). However, we expect GA to arrive very soon! Read the latest summary from the community here. The remaining tickets represent 1% of the total scope.

Join the Cassandra mailing list to stay up-to-date.

Changed

The release cadence for the Apache Cassandra project is changing. The community has agreed to one release every year, plus periodic trunk snapshots. The number of releases that will be supported in this agreement is three, and every incoming release will be supported for three years.

Community Notes

Updates on Cassandra Enhancement Proposals (CEPs), how to contribute, and other community activities.

Added

The PMC is pleased to announce that Berenguer Blasi has accepted the invitation to become a project committer. Thanks so much, Berenguer, for all the work you have done!

Added

As the community gets closer to the launch of 4.0, we are organizing a celebration with the help of ASF – Cassandra World Party 4.0 will be a one-day, no-cost virtual event on Wednesday, April 28 to bring the global community together in celebration of the upcoming release milestone. The CFP for 5-minute lightning talks is open now until April 9 – newcomers welcome! Register here.

Added

Apache Cassandra is taking part in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) under the ASF umbrella as a mentoring organization. If you’re a post-secondary student and looking for an exciting opportunity to contribute to the project that powers your favorite Internet services then read Paulo Motta’s GSoC blog post for the details.

Changed

Recent updates to cass-operator in March by the Kubernetes SIG have seen the specification for seeds now supporting hostnames and separate seeds for separate data centers. Currently, the SIG is discussing whether cass-operator, the community-developed operator for Apache Cassandra, should have CRDs for keyspaces and roles, how to accomplish pod-specific configurations, and whether CRDs should represent Schema, watch here.

The project is also looking at how to make the cass-operator multi-cluster by using the same approach used for Multi-CassKop. One idea is to use existing CassKop CRDs to manage cass-operator, and it could be a way to demonstrate how easy it is to migrate from one operator to another.

K8ssandra will be seeking to support Apache Cassandra 4.0 features, which involve some new configuration settings and require changes in the config builder. It will also be supporting JDK 11, the new garbage collectors, and the auditing features.

User Space

American Express

During last year’s ApacheCon, Laxmikant Upadhyay presented a 35-minute guide on the best practices and strategies for upgrading Apache Cassandra in production. This includes pre- and post-upgrade steps and rolling and parallel upgrade strategies for Cassandra clusters. - Laxmikant Upadhyay

Spotify

In a recent AMA, Spotify discussed Backstage, its open platform for building developer portals. Spotify elaborated on the database solutions it provides internally: “Spotify is mostly on GCP so our devs use a mix of Google-managed storage products and self-managed ones.[…] The unmanaged storage solutions Spotify devs start and operate themselves on GCE include Apache Cassandra, PostgreSQL, Memcached, Elastic Search, and Redis. We hope to support stateful workloads in the future. We’ve explored using PersistentVolumes backed by persistent disks.” - David Xia

Do you have a Cassandra case study to share? Email [email protected].