With tech companies increasingly focusing on high-level functionality, scalability, and the capacity to work with huge amounts of data, robust digital architecture is absolutely paramount. The tech industry moves at breakneck speed, and companies can’t afford to take their eyes off the game. That means, of course, that companies need to be working with digital architecture and databases they know to be scalable, flexible, and reliable. And so much of that comes down to how your database actually handles the modeling of your data.
With increasingly massive levels of data in the world – experts say the amount is doubling every two years – traditional MySQL databases are limited in how reliably they can manage data.
While MySQL databases remain very popular — large-scale websites such as Google and YouTube are powered by these databases — NoSQL databases, such as Apache Cassandra, are having an increasingly larger impact on the market. With lower costs and easy scalability, NoSQL databases are becoming an appealing option for many companies who need to work with massive amounts of data, yet stay flexible as they grow and develop. And after all, that’s how businesses succeed; by innovating, staying agile, and engaging customers.
Originally developed at Facebook in 2008, Cassandra’s revolutionary system of data management has changed the lives of tech industry workers by providing security, resilience, high performance and scalability. If your business is dealing with Big Data, Cassandra is a database that will allow your business to innovate while still providing solid digital architecture on which to grow.
Managing Your Data
If you’re developing a tech product in 2017, you’re going to need to be able to handle some serious data. And whether or not your product will be successful depends on how your database manages that data. Cassandra sets itself apart from traditional databases with its ability to easily scale across multiple data centers. This is what gives Cassandra databases the power to handle huge loads of data, and is why data-heavy apps like Netflix and Instagram use it. There is also a cost benefit. By relying on cloud storage and foregoing expensive servers and storage systems, Cassandra has a much lower cost per gigabyte and a cheaper transaction speed, allowing you to process and store more data for less. AWS Cassandra (that is, Cassandra run on the cloud-based platform Amazon Web Services), is a popular option for new tech companies that need to be able to handle Big Data in an economical way, this is an attractive aspect. Migrating data from an existing database can be more complex than starting from the ground up, so many companies choose specialist database management services to manage the migration.
Cassandra also allows for storage of both structured and unstructured data, meaning you don’t need complex configurations to manage stored data (all data is in a cluster where nodes are equal). This hugely simplifies data management.
Let Your Database Grow With You
Because of Cassandra’s decentralized architecture, it can scale linearly with the addition of new nodes. This makes it perfect for businesses that not only handle huge volumes of data, but are preparing themselves for rapid expansion. Each node in the Cassandra database is equal, and can share or request data at any time. This means nodes can be replaced or added within a cluster with no interruption to the service. Database infrastructure can be scaled up or down, depending on requirements, or be repaired in short time frames with very little risk.
This also allows for easy maintenance to the database once it has been scaled up, which is a huge advantage when the app is being widely used.
Staying Strong
In such a competitive industry, it’s vitally important to have a resilient database. Cassandra’s unique architecture is peer-to-peer, whereas a traditional server employs a common master-slave format in which all requests are made to the master server. With the traditional master-slave format, a problem with the master server can also affect the slave servers. Because of Cassandra’s decentralized architecture, there is no single point of failure in a cluster and its performance is able to scale linearly with the addition of nodes.
This means that even if a group of servers fail, the entire infrastructure doesn’t. That gives you a vital advantage against competitors who are more vulnerable to system failures.
Do It Yourself
It’s no wonder Apache Cassandra is leading the charge of NoSQL databases replacing MySQL databases. And as an open source project, Apache Cassandra is free to use and DIY, allowing for allocation of scarce resources to where they can be more efficiently used.