Be Like The Cloud-Natives: Use DataStax For High-Performing Databases

December 21, 2016 Richard Seroter

 

36768-pcf-datastax-sfeaturedModern application architectures require a new approach to data. Smart companies have figured out how to decouple, scale, and continuously deliver their apps, but you can’t forget about the datastores those apps depend on. Modern apps need databases that get deployed through automation, prioritize availability and fault tolerance, and deliver low-latency performance.

One such database is DataStax Enterprise (DSE), offering a prominent distribution of Apache Cassandra™. Born at Facebook and open sourced in 2008, Cassandra is a wildly popular choice for cloud-natives like Twitter and Spotify, as well as enterprises like Disney and Apple. Built on Cassandra, DSE accelerates the ability of enterprises to power the exploding number of cloud applications that require data distribution across datacenters and clouds. DSE delivers a premium experience for Netflix, Target, and hundreds of other innovative companies.

Pivotal customers asked for integration between Pivotal Cloud Foundry and DSE, so we partnered together earlier this year. In the summary below from DataStax, learn about the latest ways that Pivotal customers can be just like the cloud-natives.


We shared our service broker integration with Pivotal Cloud Foundry to excited crowds at SpringOne Platform Conference in Las Vegas and Cassandra Summit in San Jose earlier this year.  Since then, DataStax and Pivotal continued to enrich the integration. The broker integration (managed service broker) that we demonstrated at the conferences allows developers to spin up a dedicated DataStax Enterprise (DSE) cluster on demand. Recently, we developed a new service broker integration to further validate our integration concepts. This broker (unmanaged service broker) enables developers self-service access to an existing externally managed DSE cluster.

image00

  1. The managed service broker implements the Cloud Foundry service broker APIs as HTTP/HTTPS endpoints.  It is an official and standard way to integrate third-party technologies to Cloud Foundry platform. The create-service interface implementation creates a new DSE cluster on demand using BOSH. BOSH is the Cloud Foundry orchestration tool for installing and managing software and virtual machines. The entire lifecycle of a DSE cluster is taken care of by BOSH, from provisioning, running to decommissioning. Resources used by a cluster will be returned to a centralized resource pool upon termination. This broker makes transient DSE cluster possible. It is a true enabler for continuous integration when a short-lived DSE cluster is all you need.
  2. The new unmanaged service broker enables developers to create access, on their own, to an external DSE cluster. Developers can now share the same DSE cluster to achieve economies of scale when a dedicated cluster is not required. Different service plans can be created to correspond different user roles and associated permissions such as read or read-and-write access, etc. on objects inside DSE.  This is a crucial feature when more than one developers are sharing a single DSE cluster from resource allocation and security standpoints.

Both of these brokers give developers full autonomy when developing and managing applications in their Cloud Foundry environment through self-service.  IT resources can also be freed up to focus on more critical and high-value services such as routine platform upgrade and maintenance, or any platform-wide issue resolutions. This provides huge cost savings and agility to your business.

At the moment, the brokers are available for customer evaluation on request to receive feedback. There are two demo videos we created for the service brokers accessible below:

If you are interested in test-driving our integration, please contact me through gilbert.lau@datastax.com or your sales representatives from either Pivotal or DataStax.

 

About the Author

Richard Seroter

Richard Seroter is the VP of Product Marketing at Pivotal, a 12-time Microsoft MVP for cloud, an instructor for developer-centric training company Pluralsight, the lead InfoQ.com editor for cloud computing, and author of multiple books on application integration strategies. As VP of Product Marketing at Pivotal, Richard heads up product, partner, customer, and technical marketing and helps customers see how to transform the way they build software. Richard maintains a regularly updated blog (seroter.wordpress.com) on topics of architecture and solution design and can be found on Twitter as @rseroter.

Follow on Twitter More Content by Richard Seroter
Previous
Delivering the power of data using Spring Cloud DataFlow and DataStax Enterprise Cassandra NoSQL database
Delivering the power of data using Spring Cloud DataFlow and DataStax Enterprise Cassandra NoSQL database

SpringOne Platform 2017 Gilbert Lau, Data Stax; Wayne Lund, Pivotal "Spring Cloud Data Flow satisfies all ...

Next
Cloud Data at Epic Scale with DataStax Enterprise and Pivotal Cloud Foundry
Cloud Data at Epic Scale with DataStax Enterprise and Pivotal Cloud Foundry