Cassandra to ScyllaDB Migration Without Any Downtime

Enterprises need multiple things to run their business successfully. One of the critical things is the data store they use for storing the data that applications and different analytics platforms will use. To ensure that business is healthy, companies need reliable databases, and according to their tech budget and expertise, they choose databases.

While working and consulting with an enterprise, they ran Cassandra to support their NoSQL data-store operations. Cassandra was working really well but now when the company grew, they needed help to support the NoSQL store. They experienced cascading latencies by Cassandra Hot’s partition as the traffic increased with the events and campaigns. Also, garbage collection was becoming the bottleneck because it heavily impacted the database performance, resulting in poor application performance. Also, one more significant reason was that they wanted to avoid managing the database and were looking for an expert company that could manage it for them without significant application changes.

Why ScyllaDB?

While exploring the different solutions for the database, ScyllaDB caught our attention. We were curious about the solution and did multiple proofs of concept on the ScyllaDB. We finally decided this would be the right choice for our environment and scale. A few primary reasons for our decision were:

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Apache Cassandra Migration Last Episode: 3x to 4x Migration

In the previous blog posts of this series, we learned the basics and X-DR Setup in Cassandra. Finally, we have arrived at our last phase: Cassandra migration to a newer version.

The last 2 years have been great on our database journey. We searched for the best database for our application and ended up using Cassandra. It proved to be quite fast, just what we needed for our use case. We started using Cassandra 3.1.2 which was fine but after running it for a year we realized that it was time to upgrade as, by then, v3.1.2 had lots of vulnerabilities.

Obviously, experimenting on current production was risky so we decided to go with our non-production first. We were running the same version 3.1.2 and X-DR Setup. In the previous blog, I explained the X-DR Setup you might want to refer to for proper understanding.

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Apache Cassandra Migration: 3.x to 4.x Ep: 2 DC and DR Setup

Well in my previous blog, we learned about Cassandra’s basics. If you have not read it yet, you should go through it. We have discussed the basics of Cassandra which will be useful in your daily operations on the database.

So now we will deep-dive into Cassandra’s DC/DR Setup.

DC/DR setup is necessary in a production environment where you don’t know when an issue can occur. You need to have an immediate backup when your cluster is down, and you should always have another cluster to respond.

Cassandra is a database and for a database, we want it to remain up in any and every situation to avoid downtime of our applications. Disaster Recovery setup of databases is equally necessary as you do for your applications. So let’s get started with this super easy way where it will take a few minutes and make your DR Setup ready.

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Apache Cassandra Migration: 3.x to 4.x Episode: 1 Basics

Well, I am a big fan of Apaches tools after Kafka and Zookeeper this would be my third tool Cassandra and my first database. I and my colleague have previously posted a blog on Kafka too. Please read this also you will also find it useful.

So while working casually like any other day. I just got a call from my manager for Cassandra Migration that to in 14 days. Well frankly speaking I was afraid because I was having zero knowledge of the Cassandra Database. Also, I needed to upgrade the running Cluster

So I accepted this challenge and completed it with no downtime So let’s see how.

So I will Start My Journey Learning Cassandra in this blog, DC/DR Setup of Cassandra in the next, and Migration in the last blog

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