DEVOPSdigest

DataStax released K8ssandra, an open-source distribution of Apache Cassandra on Kubernetes.

K8ssandra, a Kubernetes Helm chart that deploys all things Cassandra, is available now and gives database administrators (DBAs) and site reliability engineers (SREs) elastic scale for data on Kubernetes.

“K8ssandra will help make data cloud-native," said Sam Ramji, Chief Strategy Officer at DataStax. “Kubernetes has made running and scaling stateless apps straightforward, but those apps need data. Bringing Cassandra to Kubernetes means having an automated open source distributed datastore that SREs appreciate. K8ssandra lets you scale data elastically and observe it with Prometheus and Grafana. It’s a distribution of known-good components that work well together on Kubernetes, and it’s a place for SREs to share operational wisdom.”

K8ssandra is an open-source distribution of Cassandra that supports stateful workloads on Kubernetes with elastic scale and auto-healing functionality. K8ssandra is deployed using helm and includes projects that the community has identified as essential for automating Cassandra:

- Cass-operator: an operator that serves as the translation layer between the control plane of Kubernetes and operations done by the Cassandra cluster.

- Cassandra Reaper: a tool that helps manage the critical maintenance task of anti-entropy repair in a Cassandra cluster.

- Cassandra Medusa: a way to backup and restore your data.

K8ssandra also includes and integrates with:

- Prometheus: pre-built and collected metrics.

- Grafana: pre-configured dashboards, enabling observability.

“Running a database at scale has long been one of the most difficult challenges for engineering staff, and Cassandra was built for exactly that purpose,” said Stephen O’Grady, Principal Analyst with RedMonk. “As Kubernetes has accelerated towards ubiquity, organizations will increasingly look for ways to run databases at scale on that platform. This is, in turn, what K8ssandra is built for.”

In March 2020, DataStax open-sourced a Kubernetes operator in partnership with the community to help make Cassandra the ideal database for scale-out, cloud-native data. K8ssandra is the continuation of that work.