Insights from Our Experts

Prologue Aspiring Cassandra engineer-apprentice was fiddling with Cassandra cluster trying to fetch the data he needed. For a while, he was receiving strange responses from the server. But after hacking his way through the CQL, he finally received the response he was looking for. He felt so proud… For a moment. Then, out of nowhere, a senior […]

Just a couple of years ago, the decisions faced by software architects were quite easy, such as which language to choose, in which DB to store data, what kind of frontend technology to use etc. Basically you could divide your application into a couple of building blocks, choose the best for each building block and […]

We had finished up the first set of requirements for some project and obtained a fully working application. It was an application for retail industry which stores article information and it was cloud based, where each company paid for subscription, uploaded data and gained access to all kinds of statistics. There was only one problem, […]

Functional testing series This post continues the story about functional testing which I referred to in Blackbox Testing Microservices. In that post we had a clear case of testing a system as blackbox as it had input and expected output but all parts of the system were under our control. There were no external dependencies. […]

Functional testing series In my previous post on the topic of functional testing, Blackbox Testing Microservices, I gave an explanation how we created a separate application which uses REST client to communicate with the main application, thus giving it a kind of input and waiting for a response to verify it. This post will be built […]

In first part of this blog post series we covered basic settings which can give you few fast wins when tuning performance. We explained how you can tune pooling options to send more parallel request over the wire and we explained how you can decrease socket timeout to get fail fast scenario, where you can handle this […]

When people think of tuning Apache Cassandra to perform better, their first instinct usually is to look into hardware, JVM or Cassandra configuration. But this is only one side of things, the client application which connects to Cassandra database can be tuned as well. Applications which store and read from Cassandra use a driver to […]

In our previous post we referred to the subject of having logs in a central place and viewing aggregated data from all the nodes, in order to figure out what has happened at a certain point in time throughout the system. In addition to log information, it is important to have all the metrics at your disposal, […]

Working on high nines where the latency of every query matters is a whole different beast in comparison with normal Cassandra use cases where measurements on 99.9% or even 99% are enough. We recently worked on a project which had really tight latencies (threshold in milliseconds on 99.999% of requests) and we needed latency measurement […]