Aerospike vs. Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.data

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.

Incentivized

We use Astra DB to improve our management systems. Storing data has become hassle-free and quite simple. When launching a Cassandra-based cloud application, Astra DB is exactly what you need. In addition to the standard training programs and videos, the extended support and training require significant additional effort to activate and cover which I feel is a bit more tedious task.

Incentivized

• featured with robustness and reliability
• low hardware resource consumption especially RAM
• open-source
• distributed no-sql server

Incentivized

• We need to be able to process a lot of data (our biggest clients process hundreds of milions of transactions every month). However, it is not only the amount of data, it is also an unpredictable patterns with spikes occuring at different points of time - something athat Astra is great at.
• Our processing needs to be extremaly fast. Some of our clients use our enrichment in a synchronous way, meaning that any delay in processing is holding up the whole transaction lifecycle and can have a major impact on the client. Astra is very fast.
• A close collaboration with GCP makes our life very easy. All of our technology sits in Google Cloud, so having Astra in there makes it a no-brainer solution for us.

Incentivized

• AQL is pretty limited and not as useful as the java client
• Documentation can be lacking for some products
• replication configuration is complicated

Incentivized

• Astra DB might be difficult to understand for people who are unfamiliar with Apache Cassandra. Improving the initial experience for newcomers, as well as offering better documentation and lessons, might be advantageous.
• The Astra DB ecosystem may be enhanced by expanding the ecosystem of plugins, integrations, and community-contributed solutions.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Could be easier to use and install. Also developer experience needs some work

It's a great product but suffers with counters. This isn't a deal breaker but lets down what is otherwise a good all round solution

Incentivized

We used the community edition.

Incentivized

Their response time is fast, in case you do not contact them during business hours, they give a very good follow-up to your case. They also facilitate video calls if necessary for debugging.

Incentivized

Aerospike is much more performant than MongoDB, however there is much greater community adoption and support for mongo

Incentivized

We also (briefly) considered building in-house. We wanted to avoid complex "Frankenstein" architectures. Combining Pinecone with another NoSQL datastore like DynamoDB would have increased complexity. A single-managed platform (Astra DB) enabled architectural simplicity and strong reliability, allowing Maester’s development team to prioritize high-value, customer-facing features

Incentivized

We are well aware of the Cassandra architecture and familiar with the open source tooling that Datastax provides the industry (K8sSandra / Stargate) to scale Cassandra on Kubernetes.

Having prior knowledge of Cassandra / Kubernetes means we know that under the hood Astra is built on infinitely scalable technologies. We trust that the foundations that Astra is built on will scale so we know Astra will scale.

Incentivized

• Being able to power the same workload on a fraction of the servers has led to better ROI for my application.
• Less servers needed also meant less time to manage the cluster, leading to savings in engineering time

• Database growth planning is less of a concern with Astra, as it scales automatically.
• Currently, they lack fine-grained security at the table level. I suspect that will change over time.
• If your load has peaks and valleys; Astra enables only paying for Reads/Writes; thus you do not need to pay for large servers to support peaks in load.

Incentivized