DataStax K8ssandra now available on any Kubernetes environment

DataStax announced that K8ssandra, an open-source distribution of Apache Cassandra on Kubernetes, is available on any Kubernetes environment including distro-specific integrations for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).

“Apache Cassandra is a highly scalable, fast and reliable database and running it on Kubernetes removes many of the operation hurdles around installation, customization and maintenance.

“Cloudleaf, Inc., a leader in next generation digital supply chain solutions, has been running Cassandra at scale on Kubernetes as a stateful set for several years now as part of its digital visibility platform.

“With the huge adoption for Cassandra users on Kubernetes, projects like K8ssandra will be a huge boost for the Cassandra community, giving it a complete ecosystem of capabilities such as automated repairs, backups and monitoring. We are excited about K8ssandra,” said Ravi Madireddy, Lead Software Engineer at Cloudleaf.

In November 2020, DataStax released K8ssandra to the open source community, where its cass-operator was selected by the Apache Cassandra community as the basis for developing a single, community-based operator with contributions from Orange and others.

K8ssandra combines the flexible, cloud-native benefits of Kubernetes together with the global scale of Cassandra – the NoSQL database used by leading enterprises including Apple, Instagram, Netflix, Sky, Spotify, TikTok, Uber and Yelp. It provides a cloud-native database for modern data applications.

“There’s no question that Kubernetes is ready for stateful, production workloads and we are thrilled to see K8ssandra as another open source stack,” said Bob Wise, General Manager, Kubernetes, AWS.

According to a 2020 CNCF survey, the use of containers in production has increased to 92%, up from 84% last year, and up 300% from 2016, and Kubernetes use in production has increased to 83%, up from 78% in 2019.

In addition, a recent paper by 451 Research showed that more than half (55%) of organizations are actively using containers while another 18% are in the discovery stage, and Kubernetes is a container management platform in use by 42%.This is further expected to grow as more and more stateful applications are containerized.

“This is the decade of data, and enterprises are building new data architectures to transform their businesses.

“The challenge is, how do we make data fluid and scalable? How do we make it modern and containerized? It’s exciting to see the community engagement behind K8ssandra and the many other projects that are breaking down the barriers to running data on Kubernetes,” said Sam Ramji, Chief Strategy Officer at DataStax.

K8ssandra project and community momentum

The K8ssandra project and community initiatives are gaining momentum as evidenced by:

  • The K8ssandra.io community site featuring new forums, dedicated documentation and educational content.
  • The first Data on Kubernetes Day with over 2400 registrations.
  • A first-of-its-kind Cassandra Operations on Kubernetes certification program to help database administrators (DBAs) bolster their careers and take the next step toward becoming site reliability engineers (SREs).

DataStax has been focused on bringing the power of Cassandra to every developer and enterprise, for any project. The company has spent the past year introducing numerous innovations such as the K8ssandra-based, serverless Astra DBaaS, and the open source Stargate API gateway.

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