Introducing Apache Cassandra at the Melbourne AWS Meetup, 2015 Jul 29 by Erick Ramirez @flightc, DataStax Engineering

1. Cassandra Core Concepts
and why Netflix runs Cassandra on the cloud
Erick Ramirez @flightc, DataStax Engineering

2. Erick Ramirez© 2015 DataStax, All Rights Reserved.
@flightc
Welcome
2
• Introducing Cassandra
• Why Netflix runs Cassandra on the cloud
• Feel free to ask questions

3. Erick Ramirez© 2015 DataStax, All Rights Reserved.
@flightc
Relational data model
3
• Normalised schema, table joins, ACID
• Joins are very expensive on billions of rows
• Sharding tables across systems is complex
• Performance preferred over “always on”
• Requires massive high-end systems

4. Erick Ramirez© 2015 DataStax, All Rights Reserved.
@flightc
Big data requirements
4
• Distribute data across multiple nodes
• Relaxed consistency
• Relaxed schema
• Scale, scale, scale!

5. Erick Ramirez© 2015 DataStax, All Rights Reserved.
@flightc
NoSQL landscape
5
• Graph, Key-value, Document, Column family
• Consistency - same result regardless of node
• Availability - high read/write volumes
• Partition tolerance - survive network isolation

6. Erick Ramirez© 2015 DataStax, All Rights Reserved.
@flightc
CAP theorem
6

7. Erick Ramirez© 2015 DataStax, All Rights Reserved.
@flightc
What is Cassandra?
7
• Massively scalable NoSQL database
• Fully distributed, no single-point-of-failure
• Open sourced by Facebook
• Linear horizontal scaling

8. Erick Ramirez© 2015 DataStax, All Rights Reserved.
@flightc
Modelling Cassandra
8
• Use Cassandra Query Language (CQL)
• Similar SQL-like approach
• CREATE, ALTER, DROP
• SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE

9. Erick Ramirez© 2015 DataStax, All Rights Reserved.
@flightc
Modelling Cassandra
9
CREATE TABLE users (
userid text,
name text,
email text,
PRIMARY KEY (userid)
);

10. Erick Ramirez© 2015 DataStax, All Rights Reserved.
@flightc
Why Cassandra
10
• All nodes are the same - no SPOF
• Real-time, durable writes
• Linear scaling on commodity servers
• Real-time replication across data centres
• Always on - no offline operation
• Because you have a scale problem

11. Erick Ramirez© 2015 DataStax, All Rights Reserved.
@flightc
Why not Cassandra
11
• RDBMS excels in ACID transactions
• You need to justify your purchase of massive
high-end servers

12. Erick Ramirez© 2015 DataStax, All Rights Reserved.
@flightc
Common use cases
12
• Personalisation/recommendations (Netflix,ebay)
• Messaging (Instagram)
• IoT (Riptide IO)
• Fraud detection (Barracuda)
• Playlists and collections (Spotify)
• Graph (SpotRight)

13. Erick Ramirez© 2015 DataStax, All Rights Reserved.
@flightc
A Cassandra cluster
13

14. Erick Ramirez© 2015 DataStax, All Rights Reserved.
@flightc
Cassandra Summit 2015
14

15. Erick Ramirez© 2015 DataStax, All Rights Reserved.
@flightc
academy.datastax.com
15

16. Erick Ramirez© 2015 DataStax, All Rights Reserved.
@flightc
Thank you
16
• Erick Ramirez
• @flightc