Open Source Insider

New moon rising: DataStax Luna is subs-based support for Cassandra

Adrian Bridgwater
Adrian Bridgwater

DataStax has taken the Christmas wrapping paper off of DataStax Luna, a subscription-based support offering for open source Cassandra.  

The company says it is offering this service due to the rapid growth of Apache Cassandra. 

According to the DB-Engines Ranking: 

  • Cassandra is the 10th most popular database management system (out of 350 systems)
  • Cassandra is used by 40% of the Fortune 100
  • Cassandra has grown 252% in popularity from 2013 to 2019

“Enterprises and developers tell us that they want the power and flexibility of Cassandra for a wide range of compelling use cases to impact everything from business optimisation to consumer apps,” said Jonathan Ellis, co-founder and CTO of DataStax. “They want Cassandra to be easier to use, backed by experts, and available in a range of options depending on their business and app needs.”

DataStax Luna is supposed to address these (above) needs and is available via a self-service website for purchasing and scaling.

The company claims to be working on the world’s largest Cassandra implementations, contributing to open source Cassandra and pioneering advances that extend the power of Cassandra for the needs of the enterprise.

This includes free downloads of the DataStax Apache Kafka Connector and Bulk Loader for all Cassandra users to make loading and unloading data faster and easier.

Organizations are finding that running open source projects for important applications without professional support is a significant risk.

Analyst firm Gartner has been very explicit on the matter.

“Gartner does not recommend unsupported open source offerings for production applications,” said Merv Adrian, Gartner vice president and analyst, in the report, State of the Open-Source DBMS Market, 2019.

DataStax Luna is available now.