Hi All I am proud to announce we are making available our production build of Cassandra 3.7 that we run at Instaclustr (both for ourselves and our customers). Our release of Cassandra 3.7 includes a number of backported patches from later versions of Cassandra e.g. 3.8 and 3.9 but doesn't include the new features of these releases.
You can find our release of Cassandra 3.7 LTS on github here ( https://github.com/instaclustr/cassandra). You can read more of our thinking and how this applies to our managed service here ( https://www.instaclustr.com/blog/2016/10/19/patched-cassandra-3-7/). We also have an expanded FAQ about why and how we are approaching 3.x in this manner (https://github.com/instaclustr/cassandra#cassandra-37-lts), however I've included the top few question and answers below: *Is this a fork?* No, This is just Cassandra with a different release cadence for those who want 3.x features but are slightly more risk averse than the current schedule allows. *Why not just use the official release?* With the 3.x tick-tock branch we have encountered more instability than with the previous release cadence. We feel that releasing new features every other release makes it very hard for operators to stabilize their production environment without bringing in brand new features that are not battle tested. With the release of Cassandra 3.8 and 3.9 simultaneously the bug fix branch included new and real-world untested features, specifically CDC. We have decided to stick with Cassandra 3.7 and instead backport critical issues and maintain it ourselves rather than trying to stick with the current Apache Cassandra release cadence. *Why backport?* At Instaclustr we support and run a number of different versions of Apache Cassandra on behalf of our customers. Over the course of managing Cassandra for our customers we often encounter bugs. There are existing patches for some of them, others we patch ourselves. Generally, if we can, we try to wait for the next official Apache Cassandra release, however in the need to ensure our customers remain stable and running we will sometimes backport bugs and write our own hotfixes (which are also submitted back to the community). *Why release it?* A number of our customers and people in the community have asked if we would make this available, which we are more than happy to do so. This repository represents what Instaclustr runs in production for Cassandra 3.7 and this is our way of helping the community get a similar level of stability as what you would get from our managed service. Cheers Ben -- Ben Bromhead CTO | Instaclustr <https://www.instaclustr.com/> +1 650 284 9692 Managed Cassandra / Spark on AWS, Azure and Softlayer
