The Aerospike Real-time Data Platform aims to enable organizations to act instantly across billions of transactions while reducing server footprint up to 80%. The vendor states Aerospike multi-cloud platform powers real-time applications with predictable sub-millisecond performance up to petabyte scale with five-nines uptime with globally distributed, consistent data. Aerospike boasts customers such as Airtel, Experian, European Central Bank, Nielsen, PayPal, Snap, Verizon Media and Wayfair.
Compared to the above for K/V lookups and writes, it is faster. However, less than 1 MB, i'd use Redis, if you're willing to write package for HA in Redis. However HA between Redis and aerospike, aerospike is top notch. K/V lookups were 20-30% faster than Redis, 50% faster …
Against HBase, writes were faster. Reads not so much. Also ability to store in other formats would be good (such as objects). Compared to aerospike, does not compare. Aerospike blows it out of water.
We were developing an advertisement time auction application, where we had to store the client's personal details, advertisement-related details, location, and many other details. Moreover, we required a promotion, cookies, and a few more details from the front end. All this information is heavy in terms of size and cannot be lost if the server crash. So, we required an extremely fast disk database with high scalability and low throughput.
Apache Cassandra is a NoSQL database and well suited where you need highly available, linearly scalable, tunable consistency and high performance across varying workloads. It has worked well for our use cases, and I shared my experiences to use it effectively at the last Cassandra summit! http://bit.ly/1Ok56TK It is a NoSQL database, finally you can tune it to be strongly consistent and successfully use it as such. However those are not usual patterns, as you negotiate on latency. It works well if you require that. If your use case needs strongly consistent environments with semantics of a relational database or if the use case needs a data warehouse, or if you need NoSQL with ACID transactions, Apache Cassandra may not be the optimum choice.
Continuous availability: as a fully distributed database (no master nodes), we can update nodes with rolling restarts and accommodate minor outages without impacting our customer services.
Linear scalability: for every unit of compute that you add, you get an equivalent unit of capacity. The same application can scale from a single developer's laptop to a web-scale service with billions of rows in a table.
Amazing performance: if you design your data model correctly, bearing in mind the queries you need to answer, you can get answers in milliseconds.
Time-series data: Cassandra excels at recording, processing, and retrieving time-series data. It's a simple matter to version everything and simply record what happens, rather than going back and editing things. Then, you can compute things from the recorded history.
Cassandra runs on the JVM and therefor may require a lot of GC tuning for read/write intensive applications.
Requires manual periodic maintenance - for example it is recommended to run a cleanup on a regular basis.
There are a lot of knobs and buttons to configure the system. For many cases the default configuration will be sufficient, but if its not - you will need significant ramp up on the inner workings of Cassandra in order to effectively tune it.
If money isn't an issue, and you're not on the cloud, then I'd go with Aerospike. If you're the cloud ie, aws or azure, then i'd stick with dynamoDB or Cosmos then. Aerospike is definitely not something you want to put into the cloud. It doesn't work well w/ cross regions. If cross DC, you'll have to write some stuff for data integrity checks.
I would recommend Cassandra DB to those who know their use case very well, as well as know how they are going to store and retrieve data. If you need a guarantee in data storage and retrieval, and a DB that can be linearly grown by adding nodes across availability zones and regions, then this is the database you should choose.
We were in dilemma in deciding the database and it was the first time we were using Aerospike. Eventually, everything went as expected and resolved the client's requirement along with positive feedback and appreciation
We evaluated MongoDB also, but don't like the single point failure possibility. The HBase coupled us too tightly to the Hadoop world while we prefer more technical flexibility. Also HBase is designed for "cold"/old historical data lake use cases and is not typically used for web and mobile applications due to its performance concern. Cassandra, by contrast, offers the availability and performance necessary for developing highly available applications. Furthermore, the Hadoop technology stack is typically deployed in a single location, while in the big international enterprise context, we demand the feasibility for deployment across countries and continents, hence finally we are favor of Cassandra
I have no experience with this but from the blogs and news what I believe is that in businesses where there is high demand for scalability, Cassandra is a good choice to go for.
Since it works on CQL, it is quite familiar with SQL in understanding therefore it does not prevent a new employee to start in learning and having the Cassandra experience at an industrial level.
