AxonOps Blog

Grab your eggnog, settle into your favourite chair, and gather 'round the distributed cluster, folks. It's time to look back at an absolutely cracking year for Apache Cassandra! Pour yourself something festive, because we've got a lot to celebrate.‍

Managing Apache Kafka at scale is no trivial task. As organizations increasingly rely on Kafka for mission-critical event streaming, the need for robust operational management tools becomes paramount. This comprehensive guide compares the leading Kafka management platforms, helping you make an informed decision for your enterprise's streaming infrastructure.

The open-source distributed database platform Apache Cassandra is advancing rapidly by bringing numerous significant enhancements to versions 5.0 and 5.1. These upgrades introduce faster performance, expanded functionality, and operational improvements. Here’s a preview of the key features coming to Cassandra 5.0.x and 5.1.x that are going to make the biggest splash.

At AxonOps, our mission is to build the most advanced DataOps management platform — a unified solution that unifies monitoring and operations into a single intelligent control plane. With the release of the latest release of AxonOps, we’re excited to announce native support for Apache Kafka monitoring and operations.

Repair in Apache Cassandra™ is still a mythical process for many engineers operating this highly scalable distributed database. The documentations are sparse, the nodetool repair command line options are difficult to understand, the theories behind repairs with Merkle trees and how that translates to the log entries, the performance impact of running the repair, etc etc and the list goes on. I feel your pain because I had to learn all these theories myself and understand the behaviours of numerous command line options and the impact they have on Cassandra clusters.

Author: Joaquin Casares

Apache Cassandra is a popular NoSQL database that provides high availability and fault tolerance through its distributed architecture. However, many enterprises rely solely on Cassandra’s built-in replication mechanisms and fail to implement an effective backup strategy. While Cassandra’s replication can provide resiliency against node failures, it does not protect against data loss due to accidental deletions, application errors, or other disasters.

Author: Sergio Rua

Apache Cassandra is an exceptionally powerful distributed database used by some of the world’s most popular online services. However, the adoption of the Cassandra DB requires some fundamental disciplines to operate it effectively and ensure you are following recommended Cassandra best practice.

I returned from New Orleans, Louisiana (NOLA) a few days ago. I came back with a nasty cold that did not help with the jet lag but still, I enjoyed ApacheCon North America 2022. The event was a bit smaller than I anticipated in terms of attendance, but the talks were top quality.

Author: John Glendenning

Jon Haddad Apache Cassandra Consultant and Distributed Systems Expert

A comprehensive comparison of schema registry solutions for Apache Kafka, and why enterprises are choosing a new approach

Lightweight Transactions (LWTs) in Apache Cassandra are a powerful tool for ensuring linearizable consistency in distributed environments, which is essential for preventing concurrent overwrites and ensuring unique entries. As we explore in this blog, LWTs rely on the Paxos consensus protocol, which has a new implementation, Paxos v2, available to use in Cassandra 4.1+. This upgrade brings significant improvements in performance, reduced WAN communications, and new repair requirements. However, it's still important to use LWTs judiciously and not as a default approach for all Cassandra data updates. By understanding the benefits and limitations of LWTs, and following the necessary configuration steps such as setting the paxos_variant to v2 and adjusting application consistency levels to ANY, you can leverage LWTs more efficiently to address specific use cases without compromising Cassandra's high availability and scalability. And, as we look to the future, the upcoming integration of the Accord protocol for ACID transactions in 5.1 promises to further expand the capabilities of Apache Cassandra.

Author: Hayato Shimizu

AxonOps Cassandra® Commitlog Archiving and Point-in-Time-Restore Feature

Author: Sergio Rua

Securing Apache Cassandra with SSL/TLS is essential for protecting data in transit between clients and nodes. While certificate management often poses challenges like expiration risks and rotation complexity, Cassandra 4.0+ simplifies operations with hot reloading, enabling certificate updates without downtime. This feature ensures high availability while maintaining security. For teams managing clusters, monitoring tools like AxonOps provide automated alerts for certificate expirations and SSL health checks, streamlining compliance and reducing manual oversight. ‍