Are you self-hosting open-source Apache Cassandra on-premises or in the cloud? What if you could have patching, deployment, scaling, platform security, cloud infrastructure, and live site support taken care of for you… for not much more than the cost of running virtual machines in the public cloud?

Welcome to Azure Managed Instance for Apache Cassandra! A first-party service in Azure, built by Azure Cosmos DB engineers, hosting and maintaining pure open-source Apache Cassandra clusters. The service allows you to spend more time focusing on developing your solution while keeping everything you love about Apache Cassandra, and gaining all the benefits of the cloud!

In this blog, we’ll give you an update on some of the latest features we’ve released for this service. Watch this space for more updates in the future!

Apache Cassandra 4.0 GA

This version of Apache Cassandra is now GA for this service. Check out the important changes in Apache Cassandra 4.0 here. Cassandra 4.0 is now the default when deploying clusters using the Azure portal or CLI.

De-allocate cluster

To help users save development costs, you can now pause and resume any non-production cluster while retaining all the stored data. 

Azure Monitor Insights (Preview)

In Azure Managed Instance for Apache Cassandra, you get an out-of-the-box experience for metrics and monitoring, and now we’ve added curated visualizations known as Azure Monitor Insights. These are a subset of the full set of metrics; those most important for monitoring your clusters.

Azure Monitor Alerts

You can now configure Azure Monitor Alerts directly from the metrics view in Azure portal.

Vertical Scaling

You can now scale to a more powerful SKU for your Cassandra nodes, allowing vertical scalability and scaling out horizontally.

Cassandra Lucene Index (Preview)

Cassandra Lucene Index is a plugin for Apache Cassandra that extends its index functionality to provide full text search capabilities and free multivariable, geospatial, and bitemporal search. For more information, see our documentation on this feature.

More SKUs 

We’ve now Esv5, Easv5, Dsv5, and DasV5 to the existing family of Cassandra node SKU sizes.

Getting started

• Find Azure Managed Instance for Cassandra in Azure Portal
• Get started easily using Quickstart documentation
• Find out about pricing here!
• Read all our technical documentation here

Azure Cosmos DB is a fully managed NoSQL and relational database for modern app development with SLA-backed speed and availability, automatic and instant scalability, and support for open-source PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and Apache Cassandra. Try Azure Cosmos DB for free here. To stay in the loop on Azure Cosmos DB updates, follow us on Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn.