Apache Cassandra / Cassandra Summit Europe 2014

Speakers: Gary Stewart & Christopher Reedijk, Advisory IT Specialists at ING

Many financial institutions have discovered NoSQL databases. Some of them are using Cassandra-like technologies in corners of their application landscape to learn, and perhaps as a means to lower the expenses for traditional database suppliers. So did ING. ING is now in production with Cassandra to increase scalability and availability for our channels applications. We spent a year with a small team of engineers gathering experience and learning what the big shift in using this technology really means for a team and for an organization. During that time we put in production the first low latency data store with Cassandra. After many proofs of concept, we are learning what needs to be done differently in the Cassandra world with an active-active setup. In this session we will talk about some best practices, the shift from ACID and Relational to BASE with tunable consistency. We will also talk about the things that we learnt and a pattern that we discovered to solve a classic “synchronize” problem in a distributed database whilst ensuring consistency. Some people say that this technology is not yet mature enough for use in financial services. We say that we have proven that this can be done; however it does require solid engineering skills that go beyond the obvious status quo in the IT industry. We are not there yet, but we are learning that we can balance the level of availability that our customers need with the level of consistency that the bank internally needs.

Speaker: Alex Bordei, Product Manager at BigStep

We all know Cassandra is supposed to scale but what is its exact scaling pattern? How much faster does it get if you add an extra node? Is it truly linear? How sensitive is it to hardware constraints? Bigstep has benchmarked Cassandra in an attempt to understand how to size underlying infrastructure for optimum performance. We’ve tested using a custom jmeter sampler built using the java driver on beefy bare metal machines with 192GB of RAM, 10Gbps network and SSDs. We’ll share our findings and other best practices for scaling NoSQL DBs in cloud environments, found by working with some of big data’s most popular DBs.

Speaker: Theo Hultberg, Chief Architect at Burt

At Burt we use Cassandra for a little bit of everything. We have a graph database, a tracing system, a stream processing engine and a document store that uses it for storage, and of course, we use it for time series too – but with a twist. Cassandra works great for all of these use cases, but not out of the box. We've learned the hard way what not to do, and what to do instead.

Speakers: Billy Bosworth, CEO at DataStax; Jonathan Ellis, CTO at DataStax & Apache Cassandra Chair; Zohar Melamed, Director and Technical Fellow at Credit Suisse; Jim Anning, Head of Data & Analytics at British Gas Connected Homes.

Speakers: Phillip Meredith, Application Developer & Jay Modha, Vice President, at Credit Suisse.

In this talk, I will demonstrate how we have built one of the most reliable services in Credit Suisse using Cassandra in an environment that is changing all the time — navigating the complex path of scheduled downtime, disaster recovery scenarios and the realities of using shared infrastructure in a corporate environment while still maintaining zero downtime for our users. We'll explore how a small team of 4 developers supports a user base of more than 600+ users globally and go through in more detail how we have deployed Cassandra and manage it from an operations perspective. We'll also discuss how we have used Cassandra’s TTL functionality to meet regulatory data retention requirements and go through some examples of how our Cassandra schema has evolved to deliver new functionality for our users. Finally, we will examine lessons learned and the future of Cassandra at Credit Suisse.

Speaker: Piotr Kołaczkowski, Lead Software Engineer (Analytics) at DataStax

You learned everything about Apache Cassandra and want to immediately deploy it in production? Great! But before you do it, don't miss what new features DataStax Enterprise has to offer. The In-Memory storage option allows to significantly decrease latency by serving all reads without ever touching hard-drives, while still offering strong data durability guarantees. And integrated Apache Spark allows to perform complex analyses of your Big-Data stored in Cassandra faster and more conveniently than ever. All of this with easy setup, enterprise-level security, visual management and expert support. This talk will not only cover how to use those new features, but we'll also dive into the architecture and some DSE internals.

Speaker: Jon Haddad, Apache Cassandra Evangelist at DataStax

This sessions covers diagnosing and solving common problems encountered in production, using performance profiling tools. We’ll also give a crash course to basic JVM garbage collection tuning. Attendees will leave with a better understanding of what they should look for when they encounter problems with their in-production Cassandra cluster.

Speaker: Patrick McFadin, Chief Evangelist for Apache Cassandra at DataStax

Cassandra is a highly performant database, but are you getting most bang for your buck? There are a handful of patterns and anti-patterns you should know when looking for top performance in your application. We’ll cover topics such as a proper data model, driver selection and access patterns. You should also know what can destroy performance just as quick, so a tour of common anti-patterns is on the agenda. Put these together if you feel the need, the need for Cassandra speed.

Speakers: Seán O Sullivan, Service Reliability Engineer, & Tim Czerniak, Software Engineer, at Demonware

This presentation covers the eight-month evaluation process we underwent to migrate some of Call of Duty’s core services from MySQL to Cassandra. We will outline our requirements, the process we followed for the evaluation, decisions we made around our schema, configuration and hardware, and some issues we encountered.

Speaker: Mick Semb Wever, Programmer at Finn.no

FINN.no is the leading classifieds website in Norway and the country's busiest website. This session will go through various product development where Cassandra has shown to be the best choice. Focusing on the primary use case: a tracking solution that collects raw time-series data in C* and aggregates it in near-real-time using Hadoop into various new datasets from advert-centric statistics to user-centric behavioural analysis. Mick will cover the final technical design chosen after three years of development iterations, touching on technologies: scribe, thrift, kafka, hadoop, pig, mahout; the hurdles faced along the way, integration improvements done between Cassandra and Hadoop, and the throughput and performance of today's systems.

Speakers: David Haines, Head of Front Office Development & Aleksa Vukotic, Head of Platform Development at Noble Group

Noble Group, a market-leading global supply chain manager of energy products, metals, and minerals uses Cassandra to power a decision-support system to assist the traders and analysts in ever-changing market conditions. In this talk, Noble will explain data modeling and querying techniques they employ to ensure high throughput and high performance data access using Cassandra.

Speaker: Ben Laplanche, Product Manager at Pivotal

Building a multi-tenant Cassandra for the Pivotal Cloud Foundry platform. An overview of the approach, challenges and thoughts on the road ahead to bringing big data products to the cloud.

Speakers: Jonathan Halliday, Software Engineer at RedHat & Rebecca Simmonds, Research Associate at Newcastle University

From sensor networks to social media analytics, the handling of geospatial data is increasingly important to many applications. In this session we discuss the challenges of indexing events by location and illustrate how to model spatial indexes using new features in CQL3.

Speakers: Andres De La Peña & Daniel Higuero, Big Data Architects at Stratio

This presentation introduces the open sourced Lucene based implementation of the Cassandra secondary indexes developed by Stratio. It allows users to make complex queries in Cassandra using CQL3, including full text search, top-k queries and free multivariable search. Relevance queries and filters can be combined to make searches such as “give me the 100 tweets that best matches this phrase of those written in a certain date range”. Cluster-wide relevance search allows retrieving the N more relevant results that meet a given condition. It’s done through a modified version of Cassandra’s storage proxy in which the coordinator node requests the N best results of each node in the cluster in parallel and combines their partial results to get the N best of them. Stratio’s index is fully compatible with Cassandra’s Hadoop support because it supports all the key/token restrictions in the CQL3 statements. Filters are a powerful help when analyzing the data stored in Cassandra with MapReduce frameworks such as Hadoop or, even better, Spark. Filtering the job input avoids full data scanning, dramatically reducing the amount of data to be processed. Any cell in the tables can be indexed, including primary keys as well as collections. CQL3 wide rows are also supported.

Speaker: Robbie Strickland, Director of Software Development at The Weather Channel

The state of analytics has changed dramatically over the last few years. Hadoop is now commonplace, and the ecosystem has evolved to include new tools such as Spark, Shark, and Drill, that live alongside the old MapReduce-based standards. It can be difficult to keep up with the pace of change, and newcomers are left with a dizzying variety of seemingly similar choices. This is compounded by the number of possible deployment permutations, which can cause all but the most determined to simply stick with the tried and true. But there are serious advantages to many of the new tools, and this presentation will give an analysis of the current state--including pros and cons as well as what's needed to bootstrap and operate the various options.

Speaker: Roy Bailey, Director of Neo Platform Services at UBS Securities

In this talk, Roy will discuss how their large scale client-facing application initiatives at UBS Securities utilize Apache Cassandra. This talk dives into their search for a scalable solution which allows them to serve their investment bank's equity time series data across the globe.

Speaker: Robert Stupp, Consultant

User Defined Functions (UDFs) allow users to code their own functions in Java or a JSR-223 scripting language. The presentation describes the current status of UDFs and its related use.

Speakers: Mike Williams, Software and IT Director at i2O Water

In this presentation, I will give an overview of the SaaS Platform and overall system that we have built at i2O Water to migrate our customers and assist i2O to scale it's business. I will discuss it's merits and especially the benefits that technologies such as Cassandra bring to overcome technical challenges that we faced with a more traditional architecture and tooling. I will discuss some of the challenges we have faced using leading edge open source software tools and how we have tried to overcome them.