Cassandra is an incredibly popular database that underpins heavy-load applications like Facebook.
Aside from being a backbone for Facebook and Netflix, Cassandra may be a very scalable and resilient database that’s easy to master and straightforward to configure, providing neat solutions for quite complex problems. Event logging, metrics collection and evaluation, monitoring the historical data — all of those tasks are quite hard to accomplish correctly, given the variability of OS’s, platforms, browsers and devices both startup products and enterprise systems face in their daily operations.
We would wish to highlight 5 important advantages of using Cassandra:
Helps solve complicated tasks with ease
Has a short learning curve
Lowers admin overhead and costs for a DevOps engineer
Rapid writing and lightning-fast reading
Extreme resilience and fault tolerance
This is what we mean by the advantages above.
Cassandra helps solve complicated tasks with ease
Event logging, metrics collection, performing queries against the historical data — all of those tasks can seem dull, yet they’re of utmost importance both for giant Data and DevOps workflows. Configuring the centralized storage for logs are often quite daunting task, given the variability of the info and a plentitude of its sources, which we mentioned above.
Building a centralized storage for logs and metrics and retrieving historical information from this storage may be a task Cassandra deals with utmost ease. Once the table structure is chosen and designed, the database works sort of a charm, easily scaling at your demand.
Cassandra features a short learning curve
Cassandra operates CQL — Cassandra command language. It’s basically SQL, but stripped of the more advanced features. While this is often a downside of sorts, this is often also an enormous advantage, because the tool is basically ready to perform exceptionally well using quite limited list of variables, commands and functions. Thanks to this simplicity an enormous Data Engineer can master Cassandra in around 30 days, thus obviously shortening the time to plug drastically for your product.
Cassandra lowers admin overhead and costs DevOps engineer
As we described earlier, event logging, metrics collection and dealing with historical data are the apparent uses for Cassandra. However, as your team is in a position to use the tool the fullest extent (and this point will come quite soon, mind you) — they’re going to definitely find far more tasks which will be delegated to Cassandra and performed excellently. Low admin costs make this tool incredibly useful, as your team is in a position to concentrate more on their core tasks like improving the merchandise and its features, rather than constant firefighting like deciphering the logs and handling the problems .
Cassandra offers rapid writing and lightning-fast reading
As this database was developed for Facebook, where many reads and writes happen at each given second, it provides incredible levels of performance. What’s even more important, these values are linear and scale nearly effortlessly. this suggests after measuring the read/write performance values on one server, you’ll simply calculate what percentage more servers you ought to increase the cluster to succeed in the specified performance levels, and scale easily. Additionally , slicing over partition rows (done with so-called partition keys) ensures lightning-fast response to queries.
Cassandra provides extreme resilience and fault tolerance
As Cassandra may be a masterless cluster, there’s no Single Point of Failure. the info hashes are being constantly replicated throughout the cluster to make sure 100% service uptime no matter the temporary unavailability of up to 1/2 of the servers. this is often especially useful when performing rolling updates or some maintenance on the clusters. Regardless if the server, the complete server rack or the entire data center goes out of connection, your customers won’t face the service downtime. Your app will always be out there, a bit like Facebook and Netflix.