Apache Cassandra 4.0 will reach beta shortly and is the first version that will support JDK 11 and onwards. Latency is an obvious concern for Apache Cassandra™ users and big hopes have been put into ZGC, the new low latency garbage collector introduced in JDK 11. It reached GA in JDK 14, which made us eager to evaluate how good of a fit it would be for Apache Cassandra clusters. We also wanted to compare Apache Cassandra 3.11.6 performance against 4.0 and see if Shenandoah, RedHat’s garbage collector, should be considered for production use. In this post we will see that Cassandra 4.0 brings strong performance improvements on its own which are massively amplified by the availability of new garbage collectors: ZGC and especially Shenandoah.

In this post we are going to take a deep dive look at provisioning a Cassandra cluster using the DataStax Kubernetes operator for Cassandra, Cass Operator. We will set up a multi-rack cluster with each rack in a different availability zone.

Editors Note: The Last Pickle was recently acquired by DataStax and as part of the new DataStax mission of reorienting to embrace open source Apache Cassandra, this is the first in a series of blog posts that will compare new open source offerings, particularly those now coming out of the new DataStax. In open source spirit we want to embrace you, the community, in choosing the right tool for the right job.

Today is a very emotional day: I’m happy, excited, and extremely proud to announce The Last Pickle has been acquired by DataStax.