Astra: The Future of Apache Cassandra is Cloud Native

DataStax Astra aims to make Apache Cassandra™ cloud-native by leveraging Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, and native control and management planes. The platform is built on the learnings from open-source Kubernetes operators for Cassandra and contributes back to the community with projects such as a Kubernetes operator, a management sidecar, a metrics collector, a configuration builder, and a NoSQL testing system. Astra focuses on four areas of work needed to run a cloud-native service with Apache Cassandra 3.11: gateway, operations, management, and deployment. It uses Envoy for routing Cassandra binary port requests, automates cluster operations with Cass Operator and Management API for Apache Cassandra (MAAC), provides metrics collection with Metrics Collector for Apache Cassandra (MCAC), and manages the operational characteristics of the cluster through cass-config-builder and NoSQLBench. The goal is to build a world-class cloud-native service for Apache Cassandra, making it the best open-source, scale-out, cloud-native database in the world.