The future is hybrid cloud, and DataStax wants to be a single pane of glass across all Apache Cassandra databases—wherever they may be
In the early days of the cloud, a decade or so ago, the conversations were generally parsed in terms of it being a zero-sum game. Either the cloud would win or on-premises would. Either public cloud would crush private cloud or the other way round. And if the public cloud were to win, then it would be a fight to the death between Google, Microsoft and Amazon.
But we’ve all gotten a little more nuanced since then, and most people accept that some kind of hybrid offering will likely be the default for the vast majority of organizations into the future. With a few exception, most organizations will take a little bit of this, add it to a little bit of that, and throw in some of that stuff for good measure.
If we accept that the future will be more complicated than the past, we raise an interesting issue for enterprise IT. How do they give their teams the option to choose the solutions that are appropriate to their particular situation while still retaining a degree of control or at least oversight?
That’s a thorny problem many organizations, and by extension technology vendors, have been grappling with ever since the first PowerPoint deck included a picture of clouds with a description of what would become cloud computing.
So, it is interesting to hear from DataStax, a data management vendor that claims a customer base as diverse as Netflix, Safeway, Adobe and eBay. DataStax is built on top of Apache Cassandra and competes not only with others doing commercially supported Cassandra, but also the proprietary world and vendors such as Oracle.
What is DataStax actually announcing today? They’re rolling out a fully managed version of their DataStax Enterprise product. Essentially it is a technology and service, offering a hardened distribution of Cassandra fully managed on top of a public cloud. At launch, the offering is available on Amazon Web Services (AWS), but DataStax promises support for Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform in time.
My POV
The original proposition for these managed service providers was, in my view, somewhat limited to the “we do the heavy lifting.” There is a tendency for that to be a one-time requirement until stability or organizational skills mean internal resources can manage the service. In a hybrid world, however, that is slightly different, and organizations wishing to retain hybrid flexibility may well see DataStax’s offering as a good insurance policy.
This fully managed hybrid service makes sense. It will be interesting to see DataStax’s growth once they have the other two public cloud fully supported.
