Cassandra vs Databases
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The document compares Apache Cassandra with other SQL and NoSQL databases, particularly AWS DynamoDB, highlighting Cassandra's advantages in flexibility, cost-effectiveness, and lower latency for significant workloads. It notes that while DynamoDB offers managed services with simpler scaling, it can lead to higher costs and vendor lock-in. The discussion also touches upon Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) analyses for various cloud services and emphasizes the open-source nature of Cassandra as a key benefit.
Cassandra vs Databases
- 1. Cassandra vs Databases How Cassandra compares to both SQL and NoSQL databases A collection of quoted online research 1
- 2. Email 6-liner ● Costs can quickly get out of hand ● Costs can quickly get out of hand (it’s worth mentioning twice) ○ Due to scaling, hidden costs, and unpredictable time and effort that comes with a do-it-yourself solution ● Not open-source, hard to bring in any other experts in-house to assist, will succumb to vendor / platform lock-in. ● DynamoDB doesn’t have SQL-like language that it can work with, thus increasing the learning curve for new users. ● Cassandra offers more flexibility. ● Illusion of a “unified platform”, will most likely need to use additional Amazon tools such as Amazon’s Elastic MapReduce (EMR) and Amazon Redshift. 2
- 3. ● DynamoDB costs would consist of a number of components: ○ Storage at $0.25 / GB ○ Network at $0.09 / GB network out (free in) ○ Read Throughput at $0.0065 per hour for every 50 units of Read Capacity ○ Write Throughput at $0.0065 per hour for every 10 units of Write Capacity Instaclustr - Cost Benefits of Managed Cassandra versus DynamoDB ● The total on-demand DynamoDB cost for our use case would therefore be $19,298 – quite a difference to the $8,724 for using Instaclustr. ● Of course, this reflects the specific use case we have with Instametrics – different balances of read, writes and storage space can have quite different results. ● However, for most examples we find that Managed Cassandra will be cheaper than DynamoDB for any significant, consistent workload level. 3 https://www.instaclustr.com/managed-cassandra-versus-dynamodb/ (27 May, 2016)
- 4. ● Using an open, portable technology – with DynamoDB, you’re 100% locked into AWS. Apache Cassandra is fully open source so you know you can always bring management in house or move to a different managed service provider. ● Cassandra provides full active-active multi-region support whereas DynamoDB only supports writing to a single region with multiple read-only replicas. ● Cassandra typically provides significantly lower latency than DynamoDB ● Querying your data with a SQL-like language rather than a proprietary API – lower learning curve and more readable code in many circumstances. ● Cassandra provides more sophisticated data modelling options such as user defined types, JSON support, and (in the latest versions) materialized views. ● Cassandra provides native ability to isolate analytic workloads (e.g. Spark) from OLTP while transparently maintaining data replication. Instaclustr - Benefits of Managed Cassandra versus DynamoDB 4 https://www.instaclustr.com/managed-cassandra-versus-dynamodb/ (27 May, 2016)
- 5. Instaclustr - Cases for DynamoDB ● Where you need to rapidly scale capacity up and down. This is useful if you have a very variable capacity requirement that your can predict in advance. ● If you’ve decided to use only Amazon services across the board. You can expect a more sophisticated level of integration. (At the expense of higher vendor/platform lock-in). 5 https://www.instaclustr.com/managed-cassandra-versus-dynamodb/ (27 May, 2016)
- 6. A while ago Amazon published a NoSQL TCO analysis that compared running open source NoSQL databases on-premises on Amazon’s cloud infrastructure, vs using their managed NoSQL cloud service DynamoDB. In the first section of our whitepaper we augment the Amazon study with the TCO for Azure DocumentDB, the planet scale managed NoSQL cloud database service from Microsoft, for the same scenario. We also update TCO numbers for the cloud hosted OSS NoSQL databases mentioned in Amazon’s whitepaper by using Azure virtual machines equivalent to those used in Amazon paper. One challenge with the approach taken in Amazon’s whitepaper is the number of assumptions (often not explicitly articulated) made about the cost of running OSS NoSQL database. To start with, the paper does not mention which OSS NoSQL database is being used for comparison. It is difficult to imagine that the TCO of running two very different NoSQL database engines such as Cassandra or MongoDB for the same scenario would be exactly the same. However, we think Amazon’s study maintains its important qualitative merit, this concern notwithstanding. https://aka.ms/documentdb-tco-paper (November 16, 2016) Azure DocumentDB vs Amazon DynamoDB with some info on Cassandra 6
- 7. Amazon DynamoDB Cassandra has been in production in many demanding environments for years now, so it's no surprise that Cassandra has a substantial lead in delivering real-world features like backup. Cassandra's log- structured storage engine -- which is also the reason Cassandra runs so performantly without SSDs -- allows both full and incremental backups with no impact on performance. https://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/amazo n-dynamodb (January 18, 2012) 7
- 8. Cassandra vs Amazon DynamoDB “If one can afford the seemingly large cost of using DynamoDB then it should be the default choice to take, given the simplicity of the APIs and no hassles of scaling up, down & managing replication, that would be required to handle an equivalent cluster of Cassandra nodes. DynamoDB, being a managed service, relieves the end-user of all the headaches associated with managing a large Cassandra cluster.” Now I have not done the math, but generally DynamoDB would cost higher than keeping a Cassandra cluster but from what I’ve heard and experienced a bit, it seems that investing in that cost is much better than having to deal with Cassandra cluster issues around consistency, replication and scaling. http://agrajmangal.in/blog/aws/cassandra-vs-dynamodb/ (September 16, 2015) 8
- 9. Why I am Tempted to Replace Cassandra With DynamoDB From the data model perspective, DynamoDB and Cassandra are very similar. Cassandra offers more flexibility for sure, and I would much prefer Cassandra over DynamoDB. However, with no managed offering that is as simple as DynamoDB I really don’t have the patience anymore. Yes, there is Instaclustr. But that too misses the point. I have done the math – it is simply not cost effective, and requires me to do the same capacity planning exercises I am trying to avoid. What I really am looking for is a fully managed Cassandra system that works just like DynamoDB, and only pay for capacity that I actually use, with simple API calls to scale up and down. Until that happens I see DynamoDB on my horizon. 9 https://thedulinreport.com/2014/11/13/why-i-am-tempted-to-replace-cassandra-with-dynamodb/ (November, 2014)
- 10. 10 www.anant.us | solutions@anant.us | (855) 262-6826 3 Washington Circle, NW | Suite 301 | Washington, DC 20037 Data & Analytics Cassandra, DataStax, Kafka, Spark Customer Experience Sitecore Information Systems Salesforce, Quickbooks, and more