As part of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, DataStax presented K8ssandra, a database based on Apache Cassandra, which should be specially adapted for cloud-native use in Kubernetes clusters. K8ssandra ties in seamlessly with Astra, the database-as-a-service, which makes the NoSQL-DB available as a cloud service on Kubernetes, and which DataStax launched in May of this year. Using a helmet chart, K8ssandra can now be installed in your own Kubernetes clusters with the same functionality.

Preconfigured open source Distribution While the Cassandra community is still working on the completion of version 4.0 and the functions it contains, which promise more flexible use in Kubernetes environments, DataStax is pushing ahead with K8ssandra. The new and immediately available open source distribution from Cassandra is primarily intended to appeal to database administrators and site reliability engineers (SREs) who want to scale data for Kubernetes applications just as flexibly as the applications.

In addition K8ssandra is based on the Kubernetes operator Cass-operator, which acts as a translation layer between the control plane of Kubernetes and the database operations. DataStax had already made the operator freely available as open source on GitHub in spring, in order to underline its own efforts to get more involved in the Cassandra community beyond the commercial DataStax enterprise platform and to contribute to the NoSQL database the standard for Kubernetes.

Fabulous support from Medusa and the Reaper In addition to the Cass operator, K8ssandra uses a number of other open source tools and projects to ensure that the database in the Kubernetes cluster is largely automated. While Cassandra Medusa, which came under DataStax’s control in the course of the takeover of Last Pickle, provides functions for backup and restore of data, the Cassandra Reaper tool helps with important maintenance tasks such as the anti-entropy repair of a Cassandra cluster.

So that database administrators, SREs and users can also comprehensively monitor their Cassandra instances, K8ssandra also includes the observability tools Prometheus and Grafana with preconfigured metric settings and dashboards during installation.

Further information can be found in the official announcement for K8ssandra and on the project’s homepage.

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