Et nubes ad astra: DataStax Astra Streaming

Clouds talk, it’s a fact. 

More specifically, individual application components, services and data commodities need to exchange information with each other in order to form the DNA of live operational systems built on cloud instances in public, private and hybrid deployments.

Because of this reality, firms need highly-scalable (it’s the cloud, scalability has to be inherent) multi-cloud (cloud formations are becoming increasing hybrid multi-vendor multi-instance things) messaging and event streaming in order to enable data to do the things it is meant to do.

In almost direct answer to this then, DataStax Astra Streaming is a highly-scalable multi-cloud messaging and event streaming platform built on Apache Pulsar and integrated with DataStax’s ‘marquee’ serverless database Astra DB, to deliver a multi-cloud solution for managing both data in motion and data at rest. 

NOTE: The use of ‘marquee’ in this sense (above) does not denote some type of database located in a wedding tent or summer fête, it is an Americanism used to describe a large front-of-house billboard such as you might see in Las Vegas, so its use in technology circles would denote that part of the platform most likely to draw attention to a company.

With the introduction of Astra Streaming, DataStax claims to be delivering on its vision of an open data stack for today’s multi-cloud applications that run at massive scale with zero-downtime availability.

“A key aspect of stream processing is the ability to interact with event logs in a way that feels familiar to anyone who is experienced with database technologies,” said Ed Anuff, DataStax chief product officer.

“While existing solutions work up to a point, they generally can’t compete with the scale, performance and reliability that comes from Apache Cassandra – the underlying database that powers Astra DB. With Astra Streaming, you can achieve the same usability benefits associated with SQL-like stream processing interfaces with the cross cloud, high-performance persistence capabilities of Astra DB.”

Astra Streaming provides state-of-the-art streaming technology to power critical use cases including real-time payment processing, personalised customer experiences and fraud detection etc.