Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review If you want a serverless NoSQL database, no matter it is for personal use, or for company use, Google Cloud Datastore should be on top of your list, especially if you are using Google Cloud as your primary cloud platform. It integrates with all services in the Google Cloud platform.
Read full review Pros It's very resilient and scalable, no downtime and no issues scaling up to meet our needs. Low latency reads and writes Cost effective - The on demand model worked out cheaper than running our own clusters Great support for any of our questions or issues Read full review Automatically handles shards and replication. Schema-less & NoSQL. Fully managed. Read full review Cons Need better fine-grained Security options. The support team sometimes requires the escalate button pressed on tickets, to get timely responses. I will say, once the ticket is escalated, action is taken. They require better documentation on the migration of data. The three primary methods for migrating large data volumes are bulk, Cassandra Data Migrator, and ZDM (Zero Downtime Migration Utility). Over time I have become very familiar will all three of these methods; however, through working with the Services team and the support team, it seemed like we were breaking new ground. I feel if the utilities were better documented and included some examples and/or use cases from large data migrations; this process would have been easier. One lesson learned is you likely need to migrate your application servers to the same cloud provider you host Astra on; otherwise, the latency is too large for latency-sensitive applications. Read full review It is hosted on GCP, which makes it harder if your company have multi-cloud strategy. When you want to migrate to other cloud providers, there can be a caveat. Read full review Likelihood to Renew For the amount of use we're getting from Google Cloud Datastore, switching to any other platform would have more cost with little gain. Not having to manage and maintain Google Cloud Datastore for over 4 years has allowed our teams to work on other things. The price is so low that almost any other option for our needs would be far more expensive in time and money.
Read full review Usability 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
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered We know Astra is built on Cassandra / Kubernetes / Stargate and can work on any cloud. The competitors we reviewed are cloud specific and create a lock in. We also have the option to run Cassandra / Stargate ourselves if we wanted to. The competitors don’t give that option
Read full review We selected Google Cloud Datastore as one of our candidates for our NoSQL data is because it is provided by Google Cloud, which fits our needs. Most of our infrastructure is on Google Cloud, so when we think about the NoSQL database, the first thing we thought about is Google Cloud Datastore. And it proves itself.
Read full review Scalability As per my experience, I never faced issues of scalability with Astra DB. We don't have at the moment a use case with millions of requests or users, so I can't give full score because of my limited use case.
Read full review Return on Investment The high availability capabilities of Astra DB can assist in reducing downtime, which is crucial for revenue-generating applications. The developer-friendly features of Astra DB, as well as support for known query languages, can help expedite development, save development time, and minimize labor costs. This can result in a shorter time to market and a higher ROI. Read full review Simple billing part of Google Cloud Platform No time spent configuring and maintaining Google Cloud Datastore. Very good uptime for our applications. Read full review ScreenShots