At Outbrain, we like things that are awesome.
Cassandra is awesome.
Ergo, we like Cassandra.
We’ve had it in production for a few years now.
I won’t delve into why the developers like it, but as a Sysadmin on-call in the evenings, I can tell you straight out I’m glad it has my back.
We have MySQL deployed pretty heavily, and it is fantastic at what it does. However, MySQL has a bit of an administrative overhead compared to a lot of the new alternative data stores out there, especially when making MySQL work in a large geographically distributed environment.
If you can model your data in Cassandra, are educated about the trade-offs, and have an undying wish not to have to worry too deeply about managing replication and sharding, it is a no-brainer.
I did a presentation on Cassandra (with Jake Luciani from Datastax) to the NYC Chapter of the League of Professional System Administrators (LOPSA) from the standpoint of an Admin.
Us Sysadmins fear change because it is our butt on the line if there is an outage. With executives anxiously pacing behind us and revenue flushing down the drain, we’re the last line of defense if there is an issue and we’re the ones who will be torn away from families in the evenings to handle an outage.
So, yeah… we’re a conservative lot 🙂
That being said, change and progress can be good, especially when it frees you up. Cassandra is resilient, fault-graceful and elastic. Once you understand how so, you’ll be slightly less surly. Your developers might not even recognize you!
These slides are for the SysAdmin, noble fellow, to assuage his fears and get him started with Cassandra.