Amazon Keyspaces for Apache Cassandra now generally available

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the general availability of Amazon Keyspaces for Apache Cassandra.

The cloud giant touts the offering as a scalable, highly available, and fully managed database service for Cassandra workloads.

Launched in preview at AWS re:Invent 2019 as Amazon Managed Cassandra Service, Amazon Keyspaces supports the same application code, Apache 2.0 licensed drivers, and developer tools that are currently used by customers running Cassandra workloads.

As it is serverless, the service automatically scales tables up and down in response to application traffic. 

AWS said Amazon Keyspaces allows customers to migrate on-premises Cassandra workloads to the cloud, adding that there are no servers to manage; no need to provision, configure, and operate large Cassandra clusters; no need to manually add or remove nodes; and no need to rebalance partitions as traffic scales up or down.

"Many customers using AWS have asked for help running, scaling, and managing their Cassandra database deployments because managing large Cassandra clusters on-premises with hundreds of terabytes of data and millions of reads and writes per second is difficult and complex," AWS wrote.

"Cassandra requires specialised expertise to set up, configure, and maintain the underlying infrastructure, and necessitates a deep understanding of the entire application stack, including the Apache Cassandra open-source software.

The cloud giant said customers with existing Cassandra tables running on-premises or on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) could easily migrate those tables to Amazon Keyspaces by using AWS services like Amazon EMR or open-source tools like the Cassandra Query Language Shell.

"Many customers have self-managed Cassandra on Amazon EC2 or on-premises for some time, and these customers tell us that managing large Cassandra clusters is difficult because it requires specialized expertise to set up, configure, and maintain the underlying infrastructure, and necessitates a deep understanding of the entire application stack, including the Apache Cassandra open-source software," vice president of databases at AWS Shawn Bice said.

"Amazon Keyspaces gives customers the ability to run Cassandra without having to worry about managing the underlying hardware, and because it's also serverless, customers can stand up Cassandra clusters in minutes and scale their database up and down with ease based on the needs of their application."

Amazon Keyspaces is available in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), US West (N. California), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), Europe (London), Europe (Paris), Europe (Stockholm), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Canada (Central), Middle East (Bahrain), and South America (Sao Paulo) regions.

AWS said more regions are coming soon.

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