{"id":4335,"date":"2022-07-28T10:00:48","date_gmt":"2022-07-28T17:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/cosmosdb\/?p=4335"},"modified":"2022-07-28T10:26:27","modified_gmt":"2022-07-28T17:26:27","slug":"explore-azure-managed-instance-for-apache-cassandras-new-features","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/cosmosdb\/explore-azure-managed-instance-for-apache-cassandras-new-features\/","title":{"rendered":"Explore Azure Managed Instance for Apache Cassandra&#8217;s new features"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>At Microsoft Ignite last November, we announced the general availability of <a href=\"https:\/\/azure.microsoft.com\/services\/managed-instance-apache-cassandra\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Azure Managed Instance for Apache Cassandra<\/a>, an Azure service that hosts open-source Apache Cassandra clusters, with automated deployment, scaling, and management operations all built into the service. In this blog, we give a quick recap of what this service has to offer (check out the short video below, too) and share new preview features.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;Managed Cassandra is fantastic. Its optimized for performance at large scale, drastically reduced maintenance overhead while improved security posture and sustainable. Forging a great partnership with MSFT and having them on our back, our team can focus more on core business competencies&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8211; <em>Data Platform and Services Engineering Manager, Starbucks<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><iframe title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/y4mc6CXA8U0\" width=\"740\" height=\"460\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h2><span style=\"font-size: 18pt;\"><strong>Hybrid Clusters<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n<p>Azure Managed Instance for Apache Cassandra is the first and only managed service for Apache Cassandra in the cloud that allows you to add data centers to an <em>existing<\/em> self-hosted open-source Apache Cassandra cluster! This could be an on-premise cluster, a cluster in Azure, or even a cluster hosted in another cloud environment.<\/p>\n<p>This allows you to perform seamless zero-downtime migrations to a managed service for Apache Cassandra in the cloud by using built-in replication capability native to Apache Cassandra. You can also use this feature to easily extend the capacity of an existing on-premise environment into the cloud. Check out this article on<a href=\"https:\/\/docs.microsoft.com\/azure\/managed-instance-apache-cassandra\/configure-hybrid-cluster\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> how to configure a hybrid cluster<\/a> for more information.<\/p>\n<h2><span style=\"font-size: 18pt;\"><strong>Azure <\/strong><\/span><span style=\"font-size: 18pt;\"><strong>Benefits<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n<p>The service deploys and maintains pure open-source Apache Cassandra clusters on <a href=\"https:\/\/docs.microsoft.com\/azure\/virtual-machine-scale-sets\/overview\">Azure virtual machine scale sets<\/a>. You still get to keep everything you love about <a href=\"https:\/\/cassandra.apache.org\/_\/index.html\">Apache Cassandra<\/a>, but as a first party Azure service, we provide additional <a href=\"https:\/\/docs.microsoft.com\/azure\/managed-instance-apache-cassandra\/management-operations\">management operations<\/a> and a financially backed <a href=\"https:\/\/azure.microsoft.com\/en-gb\/support\/legal\/sla\/managed-instance-apache-cassandra\/v1_0\/\">SLA<\/a> for availability. We have you covered on security too, with <a href=\"https:\/\/docs.microsoft.com\/azure\/managed-instance-apache-cassandra\/security\">enterprise grade principles<\/a> baked in.<\/p>\n<p>By default, the service is also provisioned using best practice specifications and guidelines for <a href=\"https:\/\/docs.microsoft.com\/azure\/architecture\/best-practices\/cassandra\">running Apache Cassandra on Azure<\/a>. You can scale up and scale down Cassandra nodes at the <a href=\"https:\/\/docs.microsoft.com\/azure\/managed-instance-apache-cassandra\/create-cluster-portal#scale-a-datacenter\">touch of a button<\/a>. Metrics, Cassandra logs, and audit logs are provided <a href=\"https:\/\/docs.microsoft.com\/azure\/managed-instance-apache-cassandra\/monitor-clusters\">out-of-the-box in Azure Monitor<\/a>.<\/p>\n<h2><span style=\"font-size: 18pt;\"><strong>More features introduced since GA<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n<ol>\n<li><strong>Terraform Support<\/strong> &#8211; No open-source database service would be complete without Terraform support! Check out the sample <a href=\"https:\/\/registry.terraform.io\/providers\/hashicorp\/azurerm\/latest\/docs\/resources\/cosmosdb_cassandra_datacenter\">here<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Live Migration tools<\/strong> &#8211; We&#8217;ve released open-source tools to achieve live migration where hybrid cluster setup is not possible, including a <a href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/Azure-Samples\/cassandra-proxy\">dual-write proxy<\/a>. Check out the guide <a href=\"https:\/\/docs.microsoft.com\/azure\/managed-instance-apache-cassandra\/dual-write-proxy-migration\">here<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li><strong>LDAP Authentication (Preview)<\/strong> &#8211; we&#8217;ve released support for handling authentication to your managed instance Cassandra clusters using LDAP. Take a look at our documentation <a href=\"https:\/\/docs.microsoft.com\/azure\/managed-instance-apache-cassandra\/ldap\">here<\/a> for how to set this up.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Apache Cassandra 4.0 (Preview) <\/strong>&#8211; the latest version of Apache Cassandra is out! Check out the important changes <a href=\"https:\/\/cassandra.apache.org\/doc\/latest\/cassandra\/new\/\">here<\/a>. We&#8217;ve released a preview version, you can specify Cassandra 4.0 when deploying clusters using Azure CLI &#8211; see step 5 in our documentation <a href=\"https:\/\/docs.microsoft.com\/azure\/managed-instance-apache-cassandra\/create-cluster-cli\">here<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li><strong>DBA Commands (Preview)<\/strong> &#8211; although we maintain the health of the cluster for you, there may be scenarios in which you need closer control and may want to override default configurations. We&#8217;ve released support for running nodetool and sstable commands. Find out more <a href=\"https:\/\/docs.microsoft.com\/azure\/managed-instance-apache-cassandra\/dba-commands\">here<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Dynatrace Metrics (Preview) <\/strong>&#8211; we&#8217;ve partnered with Dynatrace who have created an extension for integration with their PaaS platform. Check out our blog <a href=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/cosmosdb\/monitor-azure-managed-instance-for-apache-cassandra-using-dynatrace\">here<\/a> for more information on how to set this up.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<h2 id=\"getting-started\" class=\"\"><span style=\"font-size: 18pt;\">Getting started<\/span><\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>Find Azure Managed Instance for Cassandra in <a href=\"https:\/\/ms.portal.azure.com\/#home\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Azure Portal<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Get started easily using <a href=\"https:\/\/docs.microsoft.com\/azure\/managed-instance-apache-cassandra\/create-cluster-portal\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Quickstart documentation<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Read all our technical documentation <a href=\"https:\/\/docs.microsoft.com\/azure\/managed-instance-apache-cassandra\/\">here<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At Microsoft Ignite last November, we announced the general availability of Azure Managed Instance for Apache Cassandra, an Azure service that hosts open-source Apache Cassandra clusters, with automated deployment, scaling, and management operations all built into the service. In this blog, we give a quick recap of what this service has to offer (check out [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9387,"featured_media":4366,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"video","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,16],"tags":[1817,1813,1816,1815,1814,1818],"class_list":["post-4335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-video","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-announcements","category-cassandra-api","tag-cassandra-managed-instance","tag-cassandra-mi","tag-hybrid-cassandra","tag-managed-cassandra","tag-open-source","tag-terraform","post_format-post-format-video"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>At Microsoft Ignite last November, we announced the general availability of Azure Managed Instance for Apache Cassandra, an Azure service that hosts open-source Apache Cassandra clusters, with automated deployment, scaling, and management operations all built into the service. In this blog, we give a quick recap of what this service has to offer (check out [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/cosmosdb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/cosmosdb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/cosmosdb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/cosmosdb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9387"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/cosmosdb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4335"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/cosmosdb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4335\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/cosmosdb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4366"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/cosmosdb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/cosmosdb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/cosmosdb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}