Fully Managed, High-performance Cassandra Service | Cover

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Fully Managed, High-performance Cassandra Service | Contents

Table of Contents

1. Introducing Managed Cassandra 1

2. Challenges of Managing Cassandra 2

3. Benefits of Managed Cassandra 3

4. Managed Cassandra vs. Unmanaged Hosting 7

5. Common Use Cases 8

6. Conclusion 9

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1. Introducing Managed CassandraApache Cassandra™ is an open source, distributed database. Its masterless, shared-nothing

architecture provides operational database applications with near-constant uptime and

simple, linear scalability. Cassandra provides for a flexible data model capable of storing

modern datatypes – structured, semi-structured and unstructured – that run through

today’s web/mobile applications.

However, while Cassandra’s masterless architecture makes it easy to maintain at first,

ensuring optimal performance becomes increasingly complex as you scale, and soon

requires costly expertise that is often difficult and time-consuming to find and retain.

In many cases, developers spend too much time maintaining and troubleshooting the

database layer, which distracts them from writing code.

Managed Cassandra is a production-ready database service — built

on the award-winning DataStax Enterprise (DSE) platform — that frees

developers to focus on building innovative apps. It simplifies database

management by offering pre-configured, fully managed, highly

performant, highly available Cassandra instances, backed by industry-

leading Fanatical Support® 24x7x365.

By combining purpose-built technology with leading expertise, the

Managed Cassandra platform offers:

1. Simplified management

2. Bare-metal performance

3. Highly available, production-ready instances

4. Easy, powerful scalability

5. Data and application portability

Managed Cassandra is ideal for businesses that need the scalability,

flexibility and availability of NoSQL to power innovative web, mobile or internet-of-things

(IoT) apps, but that also need:

• The reliability of a production-ready solution

• Fast time-to-market provided by a turn-key solution

• Freedom to have their developers focus on coding and their IT focus on innovating,

rather than on maintenance and tuning at the database layer.

DSE IS BUILT FOR THE ENTERPRISE WITH THE FOLLOWING FEATURES:

• Production-certified Cassandra with full software lifecycle management

• Comprehensive enterprise security

• Automatic management services for transparent maintenance operations

• Built-in enterprise search capabilities on Cassandra data

• Integrated streaming, real-time, batch analytics, and Hadoop integration

• Workload management for transactional, analytic and search operations

• In-memory option for lightning-fast transactional and analytics workloads

• Visual management and monitoring from any device

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2. Challenges of Managing CassandraIt’s easy for many developers to start building applications with Cassandra. And because all

nodes in a cluster are the same, there are no complex software tiers to manage. This makes

maintenance relatively simple — at first. However, maintaining performance and ensuring

high availability present a range of challenges as your environment grows.

NEXT-GEN APPS PLACE NEW DEMANDS ON DATABASES

Web and mobile apps have new availability and scalability demands that traditional database

technologies aren’t always well suited for. Cassandra’s distributed, always-on architecture is

ideal for many of these use cases. However, as we know from the hundreds of large, innovative

companies that use it to power their modern applications, enterprises require the reliability of a

production-ready solution to ensure that Cassandra is (1) quick to deploy, (2) able to meet their

availability and security requirements, and (3) properly architected to achieve significant scale.

MANAGING CASSANDRA STRAINS EXISTING TECHNICAL RESOURCES

Many businesses that choose Cassandra find that their developers are spending too much

time tuning, patching, monitoring and troubleshooting database performance and rethinking

configuration decisions — as opposed to writing code. This can slow time-to-market, decrease

application quality, and deprive technical contributors of the time they need to pursue new ideas.

EXPERTISE IS SCARCE AND EXPENSIVE

Because Cassandra is a relatively new technology, it’s often both difficult and expensive

to find, hire and retain employees with a proven track record of managing it in large

production environments. This not only puts additional pressure on existing resources, but

can also create a host of other complexities including scaling, maintaining, securing and

optimizing Cassandra beyond the initial configuration requiring specialized expertise.

CONFIGURATION AND TUNING MISSTEPS IMPACT PERFORMANCE

With Cassandra, there are many index design and configuration options that require specific

expertise in order to optimize for performance. Mistakes can result in slower-than-desired

performance or downtime, which detract from Cassandra’s primary value proposition (i.e. a

highly available, scalable database that doesn’t compromise performance).

For instance, Cassandra is written in Java. While more recent versions of Cassandra have

strived to eliminate the need to tune the notoriously difficult Java Virtual Machine (JVM),

some JVM tuning is still required for certain workloads. Failure to do so can result in

increased latency or even failure.

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3. Benefits of Managed CassandraSIMPLIFIED MANAGEMENT AND ACCESS TO EXPERTISE

In order to ease the burden of database management, the Managed Cassandra platform offers:

i. DataStax Enterprise platform fully managed by Cassandra specialists

ii. Simplified deployment, scaling and high availability

iii. Simplified vendor management

I. FULLY MANAGED CASSANDRA SOLUTION

With Managed Cassandra, Rackspace DBAs and customer data engineers (CDEs)

help design, configure, manage, scale, optimize and secure customer Cassandra

environments. In addition, customers have access to a broad range of services, from

schema design to query optimization.

Examples of services included with Managed Cassandra

Deployment

Architecture design

Installation and configuration

Free data migration assistance

Security configuration (e.g., ACL, accounts)

Maintenance

and support

Advanced administration, monitoring and alerting

Managed patching and updates

Upgrades of Cassandra versions

UI support

Escalation support from DataStax

Performance tuning and issue diagnosis

Scaling

Access to scaling guidance and best practices from Rackspace experts

Provisioning of new instances

Resizing and/or growing instances

Optimization

Performance tuning and issue diagnosis

Query optimization

Compactions

Backups

and DR

Geo-synchronized clusters for Disaster Recovery (DR) and Business Continuity

Recommend and plan replication to DR site

Participate in DNS management for failover to DR site

Participate in DR RTO/RPO requirements

Restores from snapshots

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II. SIMPLIFIED DEPLOYMENT AND HIGH AVAILABILITY

The Managed Cassandra platform includes a range of backend and customer-

facing tools that simplify the management of Cassandra, saving customers time and

allowing them to deploy and scale faster.

Design an Optimal Configuration – Customize your configuration to address

your specific data requirements. With multiple reference architecture designs

and flexible networking options, you can optimize your environment for your

specific use case.

Reduced time-to-market – Speed in provisioning and growth planning to help

keep you competitive.

High Availability w/ Automatic Failover (by default) – If a Cassandra node

fails or becomes unreachable, the Java driver automatically and transparently

tries other nodes in the cluster and schedules reconnections to the dead nodes

in the background.

Monitoring, Alerting and Reporting – Monitoring and metrics collection

available via user interface.

Application portability – Support for RackConnect® and AWS Direct Connect

to help minimize the impact of latency while running applications at either

Rackspace or AWS data centers, respectively.

III. SIMPLIFIED VENDOR MANAGEMENT

When businesses juggle multiple providers for infrastructure and Database-as-a-

Service (DBaaS) platform services, it can be difficult to ensure accountability and

enable communication between partners. Managed Cassandra simplifies vendor

management by providing Rackspace infrastructure, certified Cassandra expertise

and DataStax Enterprise, with the production-certified Cassandra platform, all on a

single support contract.

Experts from both companies have single-pane visibility into both the infrastructure

and platform/application layer, which prevents the multi-vendor complexity that often

arises between infrastructure and platform providers. This ensures that Rackspace is

accountable, and that customers get the answers they need in less time.

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HIGH AVAILABILITY AND STABILITY

Managed Cassandra enables you to support always-on applications with a production-

ready platform preconfigured for high availability, backed by world-class guaranteed

uptime SLAs. You get a robust and resilient architecture with monitoring, backups and

Fanatical Support 24x7x365 to preempt and solve problems.

• Decentralized – With Cassandra’s masterless architecture, data is distributed

across the cluster, and every node can service any request. This means there is no

single point of failure, which helps to ensure true continuous availability

• Custom designed architecture – Allows customers to take advantage of a

unique, fully managed platform optimized for Cassandra workloads backed by

Cassandra experts.

• Fault-tolerant – Data is automatically replicated to multiple nodes for fault-

tolerance. Failed nodes can be replaced with no downtime.

• Security – Security features to help secure customers’ applications with enterprise-

grade security options. Manage access with the integrated firewall and access

control list (ACL). Instances terminate both plain text and SSL client traffic.

OPTIMIZED CASSANDRA PERFORMANCE

Managed Cassandra is a single-tenant solution certified for production environments

in Datastax Enterprise and architected specifically to make Cassandra run fast — from

infrastructure to configuration — allowing you to avoid performance issues inherent

in running Cassandra on the multi-tenant public cloud. By increasing transactions-per-

second and enabling fast, predictable database performance, customers can deliver a

better, more consistent experience to end-users.

For instance, Managed Cassandra is built on all-PCIe flash-based infrastructure. This

means that the entire platform utilizes a highly performant I/O subsystem ideally suited

for Cassandra, leading to increased speed and improved consistency — especially for

applications that need to write and re-index very frequently.

EASY, POWERFUL SCALABILITY

With Rackspace handling instance provisioning and resizing, Managed Cassandra offers

the massive scalability of dedicated single-tenant infrastructure without the challenges

and hassle of manually scaling the system yourself.

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Cassandra’s distributed architecture allows you to scale horizontally by simply adding

machines without requiring downtime or service interruptions. Cassandra also

supplies real write/read anywhere capabilities, allowing data to be easily loaded onto

commodity gear across multiple data centers. This means users can size and grow their

clusters while remaining confident that they can adapt to future needs.

In addition, Rackspace specialists are available to help you solve complex scalability

challenges in order to prepare for rapid long-term growth or for massive usage spikes.

DATA AND APPLICATION PORTABILITY

The Managed Cassandra platform is built on open standards to ensure data and

application portability. Because DataStax Enterprise delivers certified Cassandra — built

with an open source Apache license — your data is always portable, with no threat of

database vendor lock-in.

Managed Cassandra allows you to run your application layer anywhere, giving you

additional flexibility when it comes to hosting options. In addition, the platform

supports both RackConnect and AWS Direct Connect, so you can minimize the impact

of latency while running applications at Rackspace or AWS data centers, respectively.

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Unmanaged Managed Cassandra

Deployment Process

Manual deployment

• Manual installation

• Manual configuration of Cassandra, OS, networking, security, monitoring and more

• Manual testing and optimization, with a tradeoff between rapid deployment and future scalability

• Automated deployment

• Secure, pre-optimized Cassandra instances customized for your needs

Performance

• Performance varies on generic commodity servers not optimized for high-I/O database workloads

• Noisy neighbor problems on public cloud create inconsistency

• Must invest in technical resources to tune and optimize data structures, architecture and configurations

• Every aspect of the Managed Cassandra stack has been tuned specifically to make Cassandra run fast

• PCIe flash-based infrastructure

Scaling

• Manual scaling

• On your own for unique challenges and spikes

• Rackspace handles instance provisioning and resizing

• Cassandra engineers on-hand for scaling, unique challenges and spikes

Monitoring

• You allocate resources to monitor availability, performance and security

• Rackspace’s Cassandra experts proactively monitor the network, server and Cassandra for connections, lag, status of nodes, size, number of queries, and more, 24x7x365

Availability

• SLAs vary

• Issues such as network inconsistency can impact automatic failover

Automatic high availability and backups

• Automatic high availability

• Industry-leading SLAs

• Fully redundant infrastructure, from the network all the way up the stack

4. Managed Cassandra vs. Unmanaged Hosting

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5. Common Use CasesThe Managed Cassandra platform is well suited to help companies solve a range of use

cases:

MOBILE, WEB AND IOT APPLICATIONS

Cassandra’s distributed architecture make it a great fit for apps such as mobile and IoT

apps that require near-constant uptime, or that intake data from different geographical

locations across multiple channels.

Managed Cassandra offers a production-ready platform to meet these challenges

while reducing the risks of relying on a less mature technology. And with Rackspace

engineers managing Cassandra, developers are free to focus on building their apps,

improving time to market to keep up with the fast-moving tech landscape.

PERSONALIZED RECOMMENDATION ENGINE

Delivering a consistent, quality customer experience increases customer acquisition and

retention. However, it also requires the consumption and analysis of massive volumes

of dynamic user activity data in real time, to help you give your customers exactly what

they want, every time.

The Managed Cassandra platform is architected and tuned specifically for Cassandra,

with optimizations like PCI-e flash storage. Consistent high performance is part of the

design, helping you make personalized recommendations in real-time and deliver a

consistent customer experience.

MESSAGING

Email, chat, commenting and notification use cases typically have stringent availability

and scalability requirements.

To meet these needs, Managed Cassandra is optimized for continuous availability

and disaster recovery, with strong uptime SLAs – including a 100% Network Uptime

Guarantee. In addition, Rackspace handles instance provisioning and resizing to simplify

scaling, and experts are on hand to help customers plan for their scalability needs.

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FRAUD DETECTION

Cassandra’s distributed architecture and linear scalability make it a good choice for

storing, managing and analyzing large data sets in real-time. Accordingly, storing data

patterns in Cassandra allows you to detect fraudulent activity quickly, accurately, and

without the complexity – and cost – that most relational environments would require.

With Managed Cassandra, real-time monitoring across all channels and data centers

helps you identify suspicious activities before they cause significant compliance issues

or losses in terms of revenue or credibility. In addition, the DataStax Enterprise database

platform includes built-in enterprise-class security to safeguard customer data.

PRODUCT CATALOGS AND PLAYLISTS

Storing collections of user-selected items involves significant performance, scalability

and availability challenges. It also often requires the ability to efficiently manage a

variety of both structured and unstructured data types.

Managed Cassandra’s flexible data model simplifies the creation of catalogs and

playlists, with high performance and seamless scale no matter the data volume.

Multi-data center and cloud replication ensures that end users always have access to

their collection or catalog.

6. ConclusionFor customers seeking a fully managed, production-ready Cassandra solution, Managed

Cassandra is the ideal choice. The DataStax Enterprise database platform offers a highly

available, highly scalable NoSQL solution to power mobile, web and other modern use

cases, while simultaneously enabling you to focus your technical resources on activities

that truly differentiate your business.

To learn more about Managed Cassandra, contact a specialist at 1-877-934-0409

or visit www.rackspace.com/data/managed-nosql/cassandra-hosting.

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About RackspaceRackspace (NYSE: RAX)is the #1 managed cloud company. Its technical expertise and Fanatical Support® allow companies to tap the power of the cloud without the pain of hiring experts in dozens of complex technologies. Rackspace is also the leader in hybrid cloud, giving each customer the best fit for its unique needs — whether on single- or multi-tenant servers, or a combination of those platforms. Rackspace is the founder of OpenStack®, the open-source operating system for the cloud. Based in San Antonio, Rackspace serves more than 200,000 business customers from data centers on four continents.

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