DataStax has extended its Astra DB cloud database to be available in multiple regions and multiple clouds. Astra DB is built on Apache Cassandra and now supports multi-region deployments on any of three major cloud providers - AWS, Azure, and Google.

Astra DB is serverless and is charged using a consumption-based pricing model. The ability to set up a multi-region database without complex configuration will be attractive to organizations that want to have global data replication and real-time data availability. At the moment this is the only database that is serverless, multi-region and is generally available; others are either still in beta or not serverless.

Customers can select multiple regions and Astra DB runs as a single logical instance across all those selected. Each region has at least two availability zones or data centers so ensuring smooth failovers. The customer can configure the specifics in terms of where writes are committed and replicated, with the default being to failover to another data center in the same region.

The fact that DataStax Astra DB is built on Cassandra is important. DataStax has a related product, DataStax Enterprise, that is essentially an extended enterprise version of Cassandra with support. DataStax developers are responsible for around 85 percent of the code to Cassandra, and DataStax Enterprise extends Cassandra with strong management and developer tools including a developer studio. It also offers better performance and security along with advanced replication.

Where Astra DB differs from DataStax Enterprise is that DSE includes Advanced Workloads (DSE Search, Analytics, and Graph), which are not available in Astra DB. The trade-off is that Astra DB aims to reduce complexity and operational concerns, and to be an approachable entry point for developing applications. It comes with REST, JSON, and GraphQL APIs, including the Stargate APIs. There's an integrated CQL shell for interactive Cassandra Query Language (CQL) commands, a bulk loader, and metrics dashboards that show information regarding latency and throughput to the database.

More Information

Astra DB

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