Now in preview: Azure Managed Instance for Apache Cassandra

Today at Microsoft Ignite, we announced Azure Managed Instance for Apache Cassandra in public preview. Azure Managed Instance for Apache Cassandra provides the ability to provision managed native Apache Cassandra clusters, with automated deployment and scaling operations, accelerating hybrid scenarios and reducing ongoing maintenance.

Why are we Introducing Azure Managed Instance for Apache Cassandra?

Moving to the cloud can be a challenging experience for some customers, adapting to the various changes in approach that are required to run a pure Platform-as-a-Service offering. In some scenarios, customers may also be using features in Apache Cassandra that are not supported in Azure Cosmos DB, and/or are not suited to a cloud-native environment.

We use Apache Cassandra to ingest data from multiple sources at high scale. Managed Instance for Apache Cassandra makes it easy to extend and manage our Apache Cassandra workloads in Azure, and get real time insights thanks to Azure Cosmos DB and Azure Synapse Link integration. – Head of Product Engineering & Business Process Innovation, ‎American Airlines

With Azure Managed Instance for Apache Cassandra, you can easily provision a hosted native Apache Cassandra datacenter, with full feature compatibility, with the following additional capabilities:

Hybrid connectivity with an existing on-premises or cloud/self-hosted cluster
Migrate your existing Apache Cassandra deployments to a Managed Instance with zero downtime
Scale nodes in your datacenter up or down.
Delete your datacenter
Start a repair action on a keyspace
Changing the configuration of a datacenter
Automated periodic backups
Seamless replication to Azure Cosmos DB Cassandra API (upon GA)

What is Azure Cosmos DB Cassandra API?

The Azure Cosmos DB Cassandra API is an implementation of the Wire Protocol defined by Apache for the Cassandra database, which runs on top of Azure Cosmos DB infrastructure. This allows open-source Apache Cassandra drivers and applications to target Azure Cosmos DB and use it as a cloud-native, fully managed NoSQL database service with global distribution, elastic scalability, and many other features.