Delivering the industry’s first open, multi-cloud serverless database?

DataStax Astra builds upon the powerful Apache Cassandra open source database and introduces a modern, microservices-based architecture that separates compute from storage, enabling database resources to scale up and down on demand to match application requirements and traffic independent of compute resources. This technical innovation can change the game for developers and IT by dramatically improving the costs, complexity and developer velocity in operating a modern data architecture.

“Most enterprises size their infrastructure for peak workload usage to deliver the best experience for end users,” says Ed Anuff, chief product officer at DataStax. “However, this practice is expensive and operationally intensive, especially when workloads are unpredictable. With Astra’s new serverless architecture, we’re changing the math by matching data usage to workload peaks and valleys. Users no longer have to worry about over-provisioning for storage or tuning by workload - they can have confidence that their workloads, no matter how spiky, will be handled in the most cost-efficient way possible.”

While serverless compute has been around for a while, serverless data has lagged due to the technical challenges around separating compute and storage. Scaling a database typically requires the addition of more server nodes in order to handle more demand or to store more data, which, in turn, requires that the entire data set is “rebalanced” across the nodes to keep the ratio of storage and computing capability equal.

“Our DataStax and Apache Cassandra implementation has been a huge part of unlocking the speed at which we scale innovation and provide unique customer experiences. Astra serverless is a game changer for Cassandra, reducing costs, complexity, and time-to-market. We believe serverless data will be a future staple of a modern tech stack for data-driven enterprises,” said Cody Sanford, EVP, CIO & chief product officer at T-Mobile.

With the introduction of Astra serverless, developers will only pay for what they use, no matter how many database clusters they create and deploy. This flexibility brings faster application development and streamlined operations by letting developers and IT create as many databases as they need for development, testing, staging, or any other purpose.

The highly scalable Apache Cassandra open source database is used by companies such as Apple, Best Buy, Netflix, Walmart and thousands of others for demanding projects that need to deliver massive amounts of data to users around the world with zero downtime. DataStax has been focused on bringing the power of Cassandra to every developer and enterprise, for any project. As such, the company has spent the past year introducing numerous innovations such as the Astra DBaaS, to make Cassandra available to everyone, and the Stargate API gateway, to enable millions of developers to build applications on Cassandra using JSON, REST, and GraphQL. With Astra’s serverless capabilities, DataStax is removing cost barriers to the use of Cassandra for any project. 

Carl Olofson, research vice president at IDC, commented: “A core benefit of the cloud is dynamic scalability, but this has been more difficult to achieve for storage than with compute. By decoupling compute from storage, DataStax's Astra service lets users take advantage of the innate elasticity of the cloud for data, with a cloud agnostic database. DataStax has introduced a number of new technologies and services to make Cassandra more interesting for a wider range of workloads, and given its cloud elasticity, serverless Astra represents another important milestone.”