What the Future Holds for Apache Cassandra

Cluster & code action simulator - a facility for simulating operations on clusters that enables repeatable but pseudo-random exploration of state space and correctness testing. This will bolster the already formidable testing capabilities the Cassandra community offers and represents a true advancement in the state-of-the-art for distributed systems testing.

Denylisting partitions - when operating Cassandra in production, reading certain partition keys can cause undesirable effects on the entire node or within the cluster. This denylisting feature is another critical tool in the operator toolbox to reduce the impact of unexpected or unhealthy client reads and writes on specific partitions. This feature will also prevent DDOS attacks where a hacker uses partition keys maliciously.

General-purpose transactions - a popular feature in community discussion which has been quickly approved, this CEP, when implemented, will be a major feature for many users as it will deliver the first-ever database that supports general-purpose transactions without the recognized trade-offs seen in other databases, such as scalability bottlenecks or the lack of strong consistency guarantees.

Memtable pluggable memtable - this is a CEP with potentially the broadest impact for more advanced use cases such as persistent memory. This feature is also a crucial first step in exploring using alternative storage engines within Cassandra, optimized for specific workloads. Instagram has already shown early promise with this idea by adding RocksDB as a storage engine.

Paxos improvements - a feature that builds on the cluster simulation CEP and improves the performance of lightweight transactions (LWTs). This type of transaction is used to guarantee that the data most recently written is considered before a read, which, in turn, ensures a high level of consistency for any decisions you want to make on data and allows linearizable access by concurrent users. The primary benefit of the Paxos improvements will be a huge performance boost to operations in a wide area setting while also benefiting correctness of LWTs across a range of scenarios such as range movements.

Auth Plugin Support for CQLSH - CQLSH, the included CLI tool, is important and useful, but, unfortunately, lacks the same support for different authentication methods. This will allow anyone using third-party-provided plugins like LDAP, Kerberos, and Sigv4 to be able to continue to use CQSLH.

Storage Attached Indexing (SAI) - this is another CEP nearing a vote, which is designed to replace the original secondary indexing. This will enable users to index multiple columns on the same table without suffering scaling problems, especially at write time.