Simplify operational support and reduce data growth concerns with Astra.
March 04, 2023
Simplify operational support and reduce data growth concerns with Astra.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Astra DB
Our company's primary database was Apache Cassandra. Migrating to Datastax Astra has allowed us to concentrate on design and offload the operational support of the Cassandra cluster. As the business grows, we no longer need to be concerned with adding new nodes to the cluster prior to rapid growth periods, as Astra looks after growth, operational support, and backups on our behalf. My experience thus far has been Astra is a more robust cluster than we had on-premise. Our costs are better aligned with usage, whereas in the past, it was a constant planning process of expanding our on-premise Cassandra cluster prior to additional load.
- Automatically handles data growth.
- Backups and operational support are handled.
- The underlying cloud providers have robust security and infrastructure.
- 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.
- 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.
I am a Database Administrator, thus I have not had a lot of experience using development tools with Astra. I know that the developers were able to change the connection properties to connect to Astra with little effort.
We chose Astra as our primary database for time series data was already on Apache Cassandra. We also utilize a small postgres database for relational data within the application, but it made sense to migrate the data to Astra from Apache Cassandra.
Do you think Astra DB delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Astra DB's feature set?
Yes
Did Astra DB live up to sales and marketing promises?
No
Did implementation of Astra DB go as expected?
No
Would you buy Astra DB again?
Yes