INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
The co-founder of DataStax, Jonathan Ellis has been involved with Cassandra since the time it was open-sourced by Facebook
Once the project graduated from the incubator at the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), he served as its first Project Chair for the next six
incremental improvements on well-understood solutions until I joined a cloud backup company called Mozy in 2005
I built an object store there that scaled to petabytes of data and gigabits per second of throughput, and one of its features was
Rackspace hired me to work on the challenge of scalable databases
I got to dig deep into Cassandra and the alternatives that were starting to grow in this space, and I was really attracted to its marriage
of a rich, tabular data model with a fully distributed, masterless approach to scalability and fault tolerance
As a result, I started working on the code and on building the community, and when Cassandra graduated from the ASF incubator, I became the
Getting involved with Cassandra is one of the best decisions I have ever made.(Image credit: Shutterstock)LXF: I heard you once broke
It happened after I was made committer on the Apache project; I think the feature [which was changed] was adding support for deleting rows,
your development chain.LXF: And you probably stopped being so cavalier about pushing changes.JE: Well, almost literally they were the only
It was probably about another six months or so before we even had non-Facebook people using it.(Image credit: Shutterstock)LXF: Twitter?JE:
So they were early users.LXF: When did you realise you could spin a profitable company around the database itself?JE: A venture capitalist
named John Vrionis tracked me down in the spring of 2009, just a couple of months after Cassandra joined the ASF
He was looking for early-stage projects in the big data space, and we had a good talk about NoSQL databases in general and Cassandra in
What gave me the extra push was when an early Cassandra user went with a different, worse technology because the alternative had commercial
So about a year after first talking to John, I started DataStax, and John and Lightspeed Venture Partners decided to lead our series A
investment round.LXF: I talked to Robin Schumacher about the kind of symbiotic relationship between DataStax and the open source Cassandra
community and the positives of such a relationship
But this relationship has also created some issues right? With Twitter, for instance, back in 2010?JE: There are going to be times when the
needs of the community and a business are the same, and there will also be times where what the community sees as its goals are not aligned
with what the business wants to achieve
One of those times was when I stepped back from leading the Apache Cassandra Committee (PMC) in 2016 to give members of the community more
scope to lead on what they wanted to create.However, we are keen to stress how committed we are to the community
4.0 production-ready through testing and bug fixes
Alongside the code and drivers we contribute, we want to make it easier for more developers to get started with Cassandra, so that means
believe this approach lets the community set the goals for where they want Cassandra to go in the future, while we help the community
achieve those goals for more people
I think of this not as being the hand on the steering wheel but the fuel in the tank: we are not directing or leading the community where we
think things should go, but helping the community get to its desired destination.LXF: In that respect, one of the themes of the conference
is DataStax re-engaging with the Cassandra community
But what does that actually mean in quantifiable terms?JE: Well, I would say the most quantifiable piece is that we have a distribution of
actually have a product that supported open source, to contribute those back in a more immediate fashion
your keynote you mentioned that eradicating complexities when rolling out a Cassandra cluster was one of the main motivations behind the
announcements at the conference
the theme that ties these together is making DataStax and Cassandra easier to operate and easier to develop against
Where we sometimes struggle is making that power available, understandable and consumable
The next frontier is really about making things easier, and all of those things fall into that category.(Image credit: Kevin Ku /
People used to say that you were in the right place at the right time, that you had clients from the get-go
MySQL replication is a real pain point and solve their problems, because I can do that easier than a MySQL consulting shop
The database tent is big enough for lots of families to live in.LXF: Some Sylla marketing people stood at the shoe shine and were giving out
their fluffy soft toys after asking if any of the people passing were here for the database conference
almost a decade now, since the Cassandra Summit in 2010
community that exists around Cassandra is great, and we want to bring that awareness to a much bigger audience.We are excited about
Cassandra 4.0 launches.We launched our inaugural DataStax Accelerate conference this year to bring the community together and evangelise
more.You mentioned our Database as a Service in passing earlier
stuck with one single provider
They want to take advantage of their investments in their own infrastructure, as well as the strengths of the cloud, and get the best of
Cassandra is unique in being able to run across multiple cloud services, or across internal IT and external services, as one seamless
database.As more people think about the cloud and how to make it work for them, Cassandra will play a big role in running those services at
Management Committee) and DataStax, it was more the Apache Board of Directors
