Astra DB vs. OpenAI API Platform

We've been super happy with Astra DB. It's been extremely well-suited for our vector search needs as described in previous responses. With Astra DB’s high-performance vector search, Maester’s AI dynamically optimizes responses in real-time, adapting to new user interactions without requiring costly retraining cycles.

Incentivized

For smaller organizations that run lean and would like to get to deploy a solution quickly. This is a solution that is easy and quick to develop. It has a good amount of customization. However, for advanced customization this might not be a good solution. I suggest experimenting with OpenAI API and then if the experimentation is successful then it is a good idea to optimize and try other LLM models.

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

• The developer experience is top notch. Their SDKs are super easy to use
• Organization and project billing separation. You know where everything was consumed.
• Playground. The playground is super useful to prototype without writing a single line of code

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Restrictions are sometimes too strong

Incentivized

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

Easy to setup, develop and deploy. The payload for the API is simple and has all the inputs required for simple projects. There are a good number of options of LLM models to optimize for speed, cost or quality of the answers. A larger token input might improve the overall usability.

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

Graph, search, analytics, administration, developer tooling, and monitoring are all incorporated into a single platform by Astra DB. Mongo Db is a self-managed infrastructure. Astra DB has Wide column store and Mongo DB has Document store. The best thing is that Astra DB operates on Java while Mongo DB operates on C++

Incentivized

Anthropic is only the best for coding and its really really expensive. So, if you're not making a coding app, I would stay away from it. On the other hand, Gemini models are dirt cheap but come with a bit of performance limitations, so i would use it for big volume non sofisticated use cases. The OpenAI API platform excels at providing best in class performance models, at not outrageous anthropic-like pricing.

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

• Better uptime due to the managed service having no outages
• Less technical debt because we don't need to worry about upgrading our Cassandra clusters
• Lower cost on infrastructure as a whole
• Quick and easy to integrate vector search into our tech stack

Incentivized

• Big question about functionality

Incentivized