The incentives for enterprises to pursue a multi-cloud deployment strategy—a cloud-agnostic infrastructure, greater resilience, the flexibility that comes from not being reliant on any single vendor, to name just a few—have never been more compelling, and they are constantly increasing. Yes, the technological feat of implementing and managing deployments that straddle multiple clouds comes with some challenges. But as the need for this future-ready architecture increases, Apache Cassandra[1] is a uniquely primed open source database solution for enabling such deployments.
Here are six ways that Cassandra delivers a powerful foundation for multi-cloud architecture:
1. Topology-aware availability
Cassandra databases allow setup of failure domains, which structure replica placements around any common groups of machines with potential vulnerability to simultaneous failure (i.e., machines in a Cassandra cluster that are on the same hypervisor, rack, availability zone, etc.). In this way, Cassandra can be made aware of critical shared resources to safeguard availability, even in group outages.
2. Tunable consistency
Cassandra enables developers to control the consistency of a query in line with failure domains, within a data center or a rack. Rack-level failure domains are named after the actual physical racks within a data center, where machines share power and networking infrastructure. Cassandra can ensure that these racks are bound by high-bandwidth/low-latency connections and that replicas for each particular row are stored in separate rack locations. Doing so ensures that replica failure is consistent across the entire dataset and that all resources remain available.3. Remote regional awareness
Data centers within Cassandra can be treated as either local or remote, so their potential to feature less bandwidth and higher latency is fully accounted for. Cassandra drivers and nodes include an awareness of the local data center, and of what other nodes are present. Utilizing