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From YouTube: ING: Apache Cassandra at ING — Testing the Waters Consistency Required!

Description

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.