Our monthly roundup of key activities and knowledge to keep the community informed.
Release Notes
Released
The release of Apache Cassandra 4.1 continues to draw closer, and the focus is on the small number of tickets and test failures that block the beta release and release candidate (rc) for 4.1. The consensus on the release approach is "when a green run, go beta, when three green and no other tickets open, go GA."
In the interim, we continue to release new versions of Cassandra, and the latest is 4.0.6 (pgp, sha256, sha512), which went live on 28 August. This release fixes an issue that broke installations on CentOS Linux 7.
This version is a bug fix release on the 4.0 series, and, as always, please pay attention to the Release Notes and let us know if you encounter any problems.
Important: Debian and Red Hat package repositories have now moved.
For Debian, please, use https://debian.cassandra.apache.org and for Red Hat it is https://redhat.cassandra.apache.org/40x/.
Note: For this release cycle only, we will continue to support 3.0 as well as the 3.11, 4.0, and 4.1 latest patch versions. See the Release Lifecycle wiki page for more details.
See the download section^ for the latest stable and older supported versions of source and binary distributions. Please make sure you read the additional information on the Download page.
To stay up-to-date, we recommend joining the Cassandra mailing lists.
Community Notes
Updates on Cassandra Enhancement Proposals (CEPs), how to contribute, and other community activities.
For newcomers to the project, we have a useful ‘Contributing to Cassandra’ page for how to get involved and get started. We would also recommend reading the overview of the C* architecture^.
We use Jira to record project issues. Here’s a handy Jira tip from Josh McKenzie: if you want to search for tickets in your area of interest, use this URL link. Simply swap out ‘ReplaceTextHere’ in the URL query string for what you want to find.
If you’d like to help us get 4.1 over the line, check out the unassigned tickets marked as beta and rc blockers.
We also recommend viewing two Jira ticket queries we’ve created. One is a curated list of ‘Low Hanging Fruit’ tickets that are unassigned and the other is our ‘Starter Tickets’ for 4.0.x and 4.1.x. Feel free to self-select a ticket to work on. If you want to find a more challenging ticket just remove the ‘Start Tickets’ filter and dive in!
Any of the tickets on the curated lists should be of appropriate complexity for someone new to the project to tackle. Just remember to assign yourself to the ticket and acknowledge the status, such as ‘Work in Progress’ and ‘Needs Comitter/Patch Available’ when you submit your patch. You can also reach out on the ASF Slack in the #cassandra-dev Slack channel. We have 13 mentors ready to help, and you can contact them by using @cassandra_mentors.
You can also read PMC member Josh McKenzie’s latest bi-weekly update for ongoing discussions and the latest on ticket progress.
Announced
This is worth mentioning again—both the Debian and Red Hat repositories have moved. The Debian sources.list and Red Hat cassandra.repo files must be updated to point to the new repository URLs. You can find more information on the Download page^.
Announced
Aaron Ploetz, host of the Apache Cassandra Corner podcast has been busy. In Episode 7 he spoke to Ekaterina Dimitrova, Apache Cassandra Committer, about maintaining the project’s stability for Cassandra 4.0, considerations for supporting the Java 17 JDK, and tips on how to get started with contributing to the project. Just as we write this blog, episode 8 of the Apache Cassandra Corner podcast has also landed. For the latest episode Aaron chatted to Sarma Pydipally, a Udemy instructor and open source developer. They discuss his Prometheus-Grafana-Cassandra metrics collector and personal DB journey moving from Oracle to Cassandra. Please listen and share the podcast with your friends.
Announced
We are pleased to announce that the Apache Cassandra project was selected for AnitaB.org’s Grace Hopper Celebration, Open Source Day, which took place on 16 September 2022. The event is part of the biggest female-led movement in open source and promotes diversity in the field. The Open Source Day itself was a virtual all-day hackathon where attendees were encouraged to contribute to a curated list of open source projects with the help of experienced mentors. The hackathon was followed up by the main in-person and virtual Grace Hopper Celebration that ran from 20-23 September in Orlando, Florida.
Announced
The last in-person event was a Cassandra Day in Berlin on Tuesday 20 September, 2022. You can read more about this on the Cassandra blog^. Mick Semb Wever took this face-to-face opportunity to talk about future plans with community members that are able to attend. This event kickstarts a series of Cassandra city-based events with Amsterdam and London coming up soon. Please read the blog for announcements.
Discussed
Claude Warren has started a conversation about templates for pull requests. Could they help to make pull requests better? You can catch up with the discussion here
Discussed
Ekaterina Dimitrova has resumed work on JDK17 support and she is looking for anyone that wants to collaborate on CASSANDRA-16895. As JDK8 is aging, a new JDK is a critical step in deprecated older platforms.
Discussed
Andres de la Pena has opened up a discussion around a dynamic data masking feature in CEP-20. You can follow the discussion here. This feature is valuable to end users and a reflection of the growing maturity of the project and how it is being used by more organizations with compliance requirements.
User Space
DoorDash
Ujjwal Gulecha, software engineer at DoorDash, discusses the scaling challenges with their content discovery and achieving reliability in 2022. DoorDash needed to showcase relevant content as banners and carousels on high-traffic surfaces, such as the home page:
"We were able to massively reduce our operational costs while still maintaining high reliability and quality. In particular we were able to reduce ~50% costs for our Cassandra and Redis clusters and around 75% costs on our Kubernetes application hosting costs."
Do you have a Cassandra case study to share? Email cassandra@constantia.io.
Cassandra Articles
InfoWorld The Cloud Ate My Database
On the Blog
Watch the Cassandra World Party - Cassandra Community
Cassandra Day in Berlin Announced - Cassandra Community
Apache Cassandra Changelog #17 - Cassandra Community
Apache Cassandra Changelog #18 - Chris Thornett
