Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra) support for Cassandra v3.11 end of life schedule

Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra) is a scalable, highly available, and managed Apache Cassandra-compatible database service. With Amazon Keyspaces, you can run your Cassandra workloads on AWS using the same Cassandra application code and developer tools that you use today. You don’t have to provision, patch, or manage servers, and you don’t have to install, maintain, or operate software.

As many Cassandra users are aware, Apache Cassandra versions 3.11 will be end of life (EOL), effective from the release of version 5.0 which is slated for Q4 2023. End of life for a software typically means that although the software will continue to operate, major feature releases, technical support, requests for enhancements, bug fixes, and official training for the software may no longer be provided or supported.

Customers have asked us what this means for Amazon Keyspaces. Amazon Keyspaces doesn’t follow the same support lifecycles as Apache Cassandra, and the end of life date for Cassandra version 3.11.x, doesn’t apply to Amazon Keyspaces. Amazon Keyspaces is built using a distributed cloud-native architecture that is purpose built for the cloud and provides benefits such as serverless, auto-scaling, zero downtime patching, and no impact automatic backups. Given the architecture of Amazon Keyspaces, there is no impact to Amazon Keyspaces continuing to support v3.11.2.

If you’re interested in moving your self-managed Cassandra v3.11 workloads on-premises or on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to Amazon Keyspaces, you can refer to our resources and review case studies of other customers who have migrated to Amazon Keyspaces. In this post, we present some options on how you can migrate from Apache Cassandra to Amazon Keyspaces.

Migrate using DSBulk

In the tutorial Loading data into Amazon Keyspaces using DSBulk, we walk you through how to use DSBulk to load data from Cassandra to Amazon Keyspaces. DSBulk is a command line utility used for performing bulk data loading and unloading operations with Apache Cassandra-compatible data sources. With DSBulk, you can efficiently import and export large volumes of data to and from Cassandra clusters. It supports various data formats, including CSV, JSON, and even custom formats. Moreover, DSBulk offers advanced features and options that enable you to fine-tune the data transfer process and optimize performance as you perform your migration. Using DSBulk is the simplest migration method, but it incurs the most downtime.

Migrate using AWS Glue (with Spark)

In the tutorial Migrate Apache Cassandra workloads to Amazon Keyspaces using AWS Glue, we walk you through how to use AWS Glue to migrate from Apache Cassandra to Amazon Keyspaces. Amazon Keyspaces and Apache Cassandra natively integrate with Apache Spark. With this approach, you can perform live migrations from Apache Cassandra to Amazon Keyspaces by using extract, transform, and load (ETL) jobs in AWS Glue to minimize the replication lag of migrating your workloads down to a matter of minutes. You can also learn more about how William Hill migrated their Cassandra workload to Amazon Keyspaces with zero downtime with this approach.

Migrate using a dual writes approach

In this case study, learn more about how Intuit used the dual-write approach to migrate their Apache Cassandra workload to Amazon Keyspaces without any downtime. The dual writes strategy involves two steps. First, you use AWS Glue (with Spark) or DSBulk to migrate historical data. Second, you write data simultaneously to both the Apache Cassandra cluster and Amazon Keyspaces, allowing for a gradual and controlled migration process. The benefit of the dual writes approach is that you can run both your source (Apache Cassandra) and target (Amazon Keyspaces) in parallel for as long as you want and migrate without downtime when you’re ready. After you have established confidence in data consistency and performance characteristics of Amazon Keyspaces, you can begin the migration process by decommissioning your Cassandra cluster and verifying that all applications and services have successfully transitioned to using Amazon Keyspaces.

Summary

Amazon Keyspaces doesn’t follow the same support lifecycles as Apache Cassandra, and the end of life date for Cassandra version 3.11.x, doesn’t apply to Amazon Keyspaces. You can reach out to your AWS account team, AWS support, or the AWS forums with questions about Amazon Keyspaces.

About the author

Meet Bhagdev is a Principal Product Manager at Amazon Web Services. Meet is passionate about open-source, databases, and analytics and spends his time working with customers to understand their requirements and building delightful experiences. Meet has over a decade of experience as product manager on database and analytics services. At AWS, Meet leads the product team for Amazon Keyspaces and previously was a lead product manager on Amazon DocumentDB. Prior to his time at AWS, Meet worked on Azure databases at Microsoft.