Does what it says on the tin quickly, easily, and affordably!
March 27, 2023

Does what it says on the tin quickly, easily, and affordably!

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Astra DB

We run an advertising company with thousands of websites. A lot of data is generated from each of the auctions for each ad unit on all of those websites, and we need fast response times to make near-instant bidding decisions for those auctions.
AstraDB helps store all of that data in a fast, efficient, and easy way to use.

Pros

  • Great documentation
  • Easy to use. If you've used a Cassandra database before, Astra will be second nature
  • Great customer support
  • For languages not officially supported, there is a sidecar application which will expose Astra as if it were a native Cassandra cluster

Cons

  • While there are libraries for many popular languages, it is a little rough hooking up an application written in a language not in the list. The ability is there, but docs for the sidecar are hard to find.
  • Decreased costs over self-managed Cassandra
  • Raised velocity by enabling developers to work on their product more and manage their database less
Scalability has been a non-issue while using Astra.
Astra in the general case ends up coming in cheaper than it costs to run your own VMs on a VPS to self-host either Cassandra or Scylla. How they do that, I don't know, but I'm glad they do!

Do you think Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.data delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.data's feature set?

Yes

Did Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.data live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.data go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Astra DB, now part of IBM watsonx.data again?

Yes

Astra is great for when you need a quick and affordable Cassandra cluster with zero maintenance overhead. Setup is easy, and you can get running in minutes. Response times across the globe are quick. Monitoring your cluster is easy using provided prometheus and grafana graphs.
Astra does limit the amount of control you have over your cluster and sharding. (not a ton, but more restrictive than running your own cluster, as expected.) So if you really need fine-tuned control, Astra may not be the best fit. That being said, the point of having a managed cluster is that you do not need to perform all of that management yourself.

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