Apache Cassandra Changelog #11

Available since 7th September, the latest release of Apache Cassandra is 4.0.1, (pgp, sha256, and sha512). This was a rapid release to fix a critical bug in Gossip on large clusters. Please read the release notes and let us know if you encounter any problems.

Note: As the docs are not yet updated, the bintray location for Debian users is replaced with the ASF’s JFrog Artifactory location.

See the download section for the latest stable and older supported versions of source and binary distributions.

To stay up-to-date, we recommend joining the Cassandra mailing list.

Apache Cassandra is not vulnerable to the log4shell vulnerability, as you can see in Jira ticket, CASSANDRA-5883, Apache Cassandra never chose to use log4j2 preferring logback instead.

During December we ran an Advent Calendar (Twitter initiative) of new tickets to get started on. This was a great way for new project contributors to pick up hand-curated tickets to dive into.

It may be cold outside, but we’re warming ourselves up with thoughts of a great Google Summer of Code, and there are some exciting changes this year! Read Paulo Motta’s post on the mailing list.

Ubuntu 21.10 includes Apache Cassandra “packaged as a snap, enabling DataOps teams to set up a Cassandra cluster”, and the latest LTS Docker Images now include Apache Cassandra v4.

Apple indicates support and encourages further contribution to the Apache Cassandra community with a new online portal covering all its open source projects and contributions.

The Project Management Committee (PMC) is pleased to announce that Sumanth Pasupuleti has been invited to become a committer, and he has accepted! Thank you for all your contributions Sumanth, and congratulations! 👏

An up-to-date roadmap for the project has been added to the wiki.

Andrés de la Peña opened a discussion about CEP-3, a guardrails feature that is intended to be an easy way to “enforce system-wide soft and hard limits to prevent anti-patterns of bad usage”. In the long-term this is intended to prevent the severe degradation of a node/cluster’s performance through user actions such as having too many secondary indexes, too large partitions, almost full disks, and so on. This feature passed a vote, has been developed and merged! Congrats Andrés!

CEP-10 Cluster and Code Simulation passed a vote and Benedict Elliot Smith has merged in the simulator changes so can expect to see some interesting things showing up regarding correctness on our system from the new testing paradigms this enables.

Josh McKenzie is seeking more feedback on the topic of keeping a releasable trunk and our quality on the project. You can join the discussion here

After clarification that the API for distributed transactions will be modular / pluggable, CEP-15 General Purpose Transactions passed. This work will allow for experimentation in the future with other algorithms. As a community we’re excited to see how the project evolves!

CEP-16 Auth Plugin Support for CQLSH, proposed by Stefan Miklosovic, will enable switching to a new enhanced authentication scheme while retaining the ability to use cqlsh in normal operation. A vote was taken and passed and the feature is in development.

CEP-17 by Jacek Lewandowski is around an SSTable format API. The proposal is for a design that enables for optionally plugging-in alternative implementations of SSTables and for testing the individual implementations in isolation. You can follow the discussion here. A vote was taken and passed and this CEP is in development.

CEP-18 was under discussion to add more modularity to a few different subsystems. It was decided to close the CEP to enable ideas to be considered individually, rather than grouped under one feature proposal.

“Humankind is at a pivotal point in history, that requires us to work together to find new innovative ways to process the petabytes of data we create every day, and the WitFoo R&D team has found a friend in Cassandra through our endeavors to meet big-data needs in cybersecurity operations.” - Charles Herring

“In our experience, nothing beats Apache Cassandra for write scaling, and we’re looking forward to the performance and management improvements in the 4.0 release. We rely on Cassandra to help manage nearly two exabytes of customer data and serve over 500 billion files for our customers across 175 countries so optimizing Cassandra’s capabilities and performance means a lot to us.” - Elliott Sims

Do you have a Cassandra case study to share? Email cassandra@constantia.io.