Top 5 reasons to use the Apache Cassandra Database

Cassandra is an incredibly popular database that underpins heavy-load applications like Facebook. Today we will list even more reasons for adding Cassandra to your toolkit.

Aside from being a backbone for Facebook and Netflix, Cassandra is a very scalable and resilient database that is easy to master and simple to configure, providing neat solutions for quite complex problems. Event logging, metrics collection and evaluation, monitoring the historical data — all of these tasks are quite hard to accomplish correctly, given the variety of OS’s, platforms, browsers and devices both startup products and enterprise systems face in their daily operations.

We would like to highlight 5 important advantages of using Cassandra:

1. Helps solve complicated tasks with ease
2. Has a short learning curve
3. Lowers admin overhead and costs for a DevOps engineer
4. Rapid writing and lightning-fast reading
5. Extreme resilience and fault tolerance

This is what we mean by the benefits above.

Cassandra helps solve complicated tasks with ease

Event logging, metrics collection, performing queries against the historical data — all of these tasks can seem dull, yet they are of utmost importance both for Big Data and DevOps workflows. Configuring the centralized storage for logs can be quite a daunting task, given the variety of the data 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 is a task Cassandra deals with utmost ease. Once the table structure is chosen and designed, the database works like a charm, easily scaling at your demand.

Cassandra has a short learning curve

Cassandra operates CQL — Cassandra Query Language. It is basically SQL, but stripped of the more advanced features. While this is a downside of sorts, this is also a huge advantage, as the tool is really able to perform exceptionally well using quite a limited list of variables, commands and functions. Due to this simplicity a Big Data Engineer can master Cassandra in around 30 days, thus obviously shortening the time to market drastically for your product.

Cassandra lowers admin overhead and costs DevOps engineer

As we described earlier, event logging, metrics collection and working with historical data are the obvious uses for Cassandra. However, as your team is able to use the tool the fullest extent (and this time will come quite soon, mind you) — they will definitely find much more tasks that can be delegated to Cassandra and performed excellently. Low admin costs make this tool incredibly useful, as your team is able to concentrate more on their core tasks like improving the product and its features, instead of constant firefighting like deciphering the logs and dealing with the issues.

Cassandra offers rapid writing and lightning-fast reading

As this database was developed for Facebook, where millions of reads and writes happen at each given second, it provides incredible levels of performance. What is even more important, these values are linear and scale nearly effortlessly. This means after measuring the read/write performance values on one server, you can simply calculate how many more servers you should add to the cluster to reach the required performance levels, and scale easily. In addition, 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 is a masterless cluster, there is no Single Point of Failure. The data hashes are being constantly replicated throughout the cluster to ensure 100% service uptime regardless of the temporary unavailability of up to 1/2 of the servers. This is especially useful when performing rolling updates or some maintenance on the clusters. Regardless if the server, the full server rack or the whole data center goes out of connection, your customers will not face the service downtime. Your app will always be out there, just like Facebook and Netflix.

Final thoughts

We hope you now agree Cassandra database can be extremely useful for a multitude of tasks. Even if the project requirements do not allow using this tool as the main database, mastering it will be hugely beneficial for any Big Data Engineer, who aims to become a valuable specialist.