Modern applications demand databases with modern and advanced features like low latency, high throughput, scalability, highly available, multi-geo capabilities, supports multi-cloud strategy, masterless/Peer-to-Peer architecture, and Search capabilities. Cassandra is one of the leading databases with all the required features. Apache Cassandra  has consistently been ranked amongst the most popular databases in the world, as per the DB-engines.com ranking often sitting in the top 10.

Seagate announced the publication of a major analysis of trends in a study by IDC titled  Data Age 2025  — which predicts worldwide data creation will grow to an enormous 163 zettabytes (ZB) by 2025. That’s ten times the amount of data produced in 2017.

Nowadays companies deal with humongous data. Data comes from various sources and various formats like mobile, IoT or it can be web. Digitalization, modernization, and mobile adoption are the reasons for data growth. This is not surprising because people are transacting more online. Spryker, the leading platform for Enterprise Marketplaces, Thing Commerce, and Unified Commerce, has launched its Australian Online Grocery Report 2022. The research of 2,500 Australian consumers finds almost half – 48% – of Australians buy at least some of their groceries online, with 10% now ordering most or all of their groceries via the internet. In total, 23% of Australian household food budgets are now spent ordering online. Similar trends are visible across other retail sectors, and even if people head to stores versus ordering online, they take a digital approach with them. This trend is not an exception for the banking sector. Due to smart mobile adoption and banks’ modern applications bring users an easy way to access and do transactions within second’s time. We can imagine the rate of access to UPI, NEFT or IMPS API’s and the throughput rate. Yes, it generates huge data. But we need a way to analyze this data and get meaningful insights like customer 360 degrees. We can use modern database capabilities without dumping data to different sources.

If customers are shifting towards digital channels, companies need to follow the same trend. Data is important because it can provide better insight into customer behaviors. Managing the data and applications to provide that level of insight and responsiveness requires agility, elasticity, and scale. If you combine the three elements, digital transformation comes into its own.
Databases are a crucial part of that modernization. The fact is that traditional relational databases do not provide the scale and flexibility to match the needs. Modern NoSQL databases have been designed for that.

NoSQL is not a new term. We hear this buzzword everywhere. It was designed with specific use cases in mind. Scalability, Performance, and High Availability are the base pillars and objectives of NoSQL databases.

Many NoSQL family databases came into the market, and some are open source. Cassandra’s database comes into this category. Companies’ adoption was great and these databases slowly changed from specialized to general-purpose databases and covered a wide range of use cases.

Users ask the following questions before choosing the right database for their needs.

Cassandra is one of the popular NoSQL databases. It is a column family Database. The major advantages of Cassandra are masterless and effective utilization of computing capabilities. Multi-master capabilities bring sub-millisecond latency. Can add new nodes to existing clusters easily. Increasing throughput or size capacity becomes easy by adding new nodes.

Adopt the Cassandra database if your modern application requires highly available, low latency, highly scalable, multi-cloud, or multi-region and multi-master capabilities. Most organizations have begun implementing multi-cloud; multi-geo approaches for several reasons. Selecting the correct database for the correct workload and strategy is the most important aspect in today’s world of technology. Think twice and choose the correct database for your workload.

Below picture shows a simple Cassandra cluster with 10 nodes. Orange nodes can take Write/Read workloads. Blue color nodes have the solr + spark capabilities which can be useful for Reporting and Analytics workload.

Final Thoughts

Leading companies around the globe, ranging from banking and securities to retail sectors, are using Cassandra for myriads of use cases. One of the major reasons for preferring Cassandra is that it can help any brand in managing large volumes of data, ensure high fault tolerance, agilility and cost-effective scalability. Cassandra is known for its seamless replication—all without compromising performance. It’s also an ideal choice for cloud-native applications, or hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments.

Hope this article helped you understand need for modern databases. Explore our other articles on latest open source technologies.

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