What does Kubernetes provide that allows us to reduce the complexity of Apache Cassandra while making it better suited for cloud native deployments?

That was the question we started with as we began a mission to bring Cassandra closer to Kubernetes and eliminate the redundancy. Many great open source databases have been adapted to run on Kubernetes, without relying on the deep ecosystem of projects that it takes to run in Kubernetes (there is a difference).

The design and implementation of the Astra Serverless Database re-architected Apache Cassandra to run only on Kubernetes infrastructure, and is a silicon valley success story on top of Kubernetes taking advantage of some of its best values. Built to be optimised for multi-tenancy and auto-scaling, we set out with a design goal to completely separate compute and storage. Decoupling different aspects of Cassandra into scaleable services and relying on the benefits of Kubernetes and it's ecosystem created a simpler more powerful database service than a stand alone, bare-metal Cassandra cluster. The entire system is now built on Apache Cassandra, Stargate, Etcd, Prometheus, and object-storage like Minio or Ceph.