cassandra summit 2014: astyanax — to be or not to be

Astyanax To be or not to be

Puneet Oberai, Netflix

#CassandraSummit2014

Puneet Oberai Senior Software Engineer - Netflix, Inc Previously at Amazon Web Services (AWS) @opuneet

https://github.com/Netflix/astyanax

Image - http://www.artandarchitecture.org.uk/images/conway/3f324eee.html

Top Level Features

•  Load balancing

•  Connection pooling - resilient with failover and retries

•  Pluggable host discovery mechanism

•  Metrics (there are a lot!)

•  Highly configurable and pluggable

Fluent Query Syntax

Mutation Batch

Fluent Query Syntax Row Query with column slice (reverse sorting)

Recipes

•  All Rows Reader

•  Distributed Row Lock

•  Chunked Object Store

How Does Netflix Use Astyanax

Java Driver Release

•  Async interface!

•  Cursor support

•  Collections

•  Flexible retry policies

•  And everything else in CQL ..

BUT WHAT ABOUT THRIFT !!?? ���I’M STILL USING IT. ������

No worries, Astyanax still works over thrift J

New features only available via CQL / native protocol

Is this a carrot or a stick?

900+ devs need to refactor their code

Bear and stick is not a good idea!

No wait! Astyanax has a new adaptor

•  Built on top of Java Driver

•  All your queries are now async

•  Astyanax APIs (structured queries) are supported

•  All Astyanax recipes work

Much better adoption model!

Astyanax Can Use Both Drivers

What About Performance?

If you use prepared statements, you’re good!

More findings on our blog

http://techblog.netflix.com/2013/12/astyanax-update.html

Prepared Statements

•  There is no magic here •  You “prepare”

•  Then you re-use

For generic DAOs this means - prepared statement management.

Astyanax Value Add

Structured Queries Naturally Have Some Query Signature

keyspace.prepareQuery( myCF )!

.withRow( myRowKey )!

.withColumnSlice( start, end)!

.execute();!

Translates to select * from ks.myCF where key=? and column1 >=? and column1 <=?;

But wait! Something is not right with the new model

•  Are columns really columns?

•  Are rows still rows?

•  Are columns really rows?

Simple Schema key validator – int col comparator – int default validator – utf8

Rows Are Now Transposed

Astyanax preserves original semantics

•  Astyanax maintains backwards compatibility with the api

•  Hence rows are still rows and columns are still columns

Takeaway for Astyanax

Apps really care about high level abstractions

•  Time series

•  Sliding window •  Objects with attribute based indexing

So What Should I Use?

•  Astyanax presents a higher level abstraction •  Astyanax has recipes

•  Astyanax is good for structured queries

•  If all you want is CQL3, then use Java Driver

http://github.com/Netflix/astyanax

https://jobs.netflix.com

Questions