Astra DB - great for fluctuating workloads and consistently fast
July 18, 2025

Astra DB - great for fluctuating workloads and consistently fast

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

Overall Satisfaction with Astra DB

We use Astra DB as the primary data store for our Enrich and Engage products. Enrich is an AI-driven financial transaction enrichment product composed of several models that identify valuable information from data provided either by core banking or digital banking platforms used by financial institutions or retrieved using open banking connectivity. Engage is a set of tools that help financial institutions improve their digital channels with a focus on financial literacy, financial management and making better decisions based on enriched data.

Pros

  • 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.

Cons

  • We feel that some monitoring/observability improvements could be made - we have lots of different data streams in multiple regions, and being able to monitor consistently across all (incl. the storage) makes life easier.
  • As with any solution deployed at a large scale, cost is always a major factor
  • Moving from previous solution (a self-hosted Cassandra) enabled us to move towards less compex, less labour-intense and ultimately less expensive solution.
  • Compared to the previous solution, we have been able to move from servicing clients that had dozens of thousands of end users to clients serving millions - operationally, that would have been very difficult to achieve without Astra, especially with the latencies and level of service required.
That is probably the most important feature of Astra DB for us. We have a very diverse group of clients, with some serving dozens of thousands of end customers and the biggest ones being multi-national financial institutions with millions of users. All those distributed across the globe. Being able to size right and then handle the variable loads is the key feature for us and Astra delivers.
The biggest competitor was Cassandra which we have been using as the self-hosted solution, so we had the option of going to hosted versions as well. The main advantage of Astra was the ability to combine managed experience with scalability, which was Datastax' strong suit. The other options either didn't convince in terms of the ability to provide load flexibility or we found shortcomings in how they can be managed/hosted etc.

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?

Yes

Did implementation of Astra DB go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Astra DB again?

Yes

It excels at providing Google Cloud-based enterprise storage that scales nicely, is able to handle variable loads and is fast. The critically important part for us - the fluctuating loads - is handled particularly well, and it is not something we would like to handle by sizing the infrastructure towards the peaks, as it would make it prohibitively expensive using some of the potential alternatives.

Astra DB Feature Ratings

Vector Database
6.5
Vector Data Connection
8
Vector Data Editing
Not Rated
Attribute Management
4
Geospatial Analysis
Not Rated
Data Import/Export
10
Data Sharing and Collaboration
4

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