AWS launches managed Cassandra services

Today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon announced a new ability to manage Cassandra databases on AWS.

Already used by companies as diverse as Grubhub.com, Netflix, Ooyala, Openwave, Reddit and Uber to manage distributed NoSQL databases that handle large amounts of data across commodity servers, the new Amazon Managed Apache Cassandra Service is AWS’s attempt to offer Cassandra directly instead of through third-party vendors.

The Amazon MCS is serverless, so users pay for the resources they use and it can automatically scale up and down in response to application traffic, the company says. It enables the development of applications that can serve thousands of requests per second with unlimited throughput and storage (something that can be incredibly attractive for IOT customers).

With the new services, developers can run Cassandra workloads on AWS using the same application code and developer tools they’re already using. Application updates just require changing the endpoint to the one in the Amazon MCS service table, the company said.

The data is also encrypted at rest by default using encryption keys that are stored in AWS Key Management Service (KMS). And Amazon MCS is also integrated with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to help developers manage and access table data, the company said.

Amazon also said it would work with the Cassandra API libraries and contribute to bug fixes to the open-source Apache Cassandra project. AWS is charging for on-demand capacity during the preview and at general availability the company will make provisioned throughput available for more predictable workloads.

For now, the product is a part of Amazon’s free tier; for the first three months companies can receive a free tier of 30 million write request units, 30 million read request units and one gig of storage.