TBH, this sounds to me like a very expensive (in terms of effort) way to deal with whatever Kafka unreliability you’re having. We have lots of both Kafka and Cassandra clusters under management and I have no doubt that Kafka is capable of being as reliable as Cassandra (and both are capable of achieving 99.99%+ availability) and, if anything, is easier to achieve that reliability with Kafka. Adding an additional distributed tech to manage is a whole lot of new learning if you’re not already expert at it.
I think someone else suggest just running parallel Kafka cluster – I’ve certainly seen that be succesful. However, a really good recommendation probably requires a bit more understand of just what kind of issues you’re worried about with Kafka. Cheers Ben From: Bowen Song via user <user@cassandra.apache.org> Date: Saturday, 17 February 2024 at 23:40 To: user@cassandra.apache.org <user@cassandra.apache.org> Cc: Bowen Song <bo...@bso.ng> Subject: Re: Requesting Feedback for Cassandra as a backup solution. EXTERNAL EMAIL - USE CAUTION when clicking links or attachments Hi Gowtham, On the face of it, it sounds like you are planning to use Cassandra for a queue-like application, which is a well documented anti-pattern. If that's not the case, can you please show the table schema and some example queries? Cheers, Bowen On 17/02/2024 08:44, Gowtham S wrote: Dear Cassandra Community, I am reaching out to seek your valuable feedback and insights on a proposed solution we are considering for managing Kafka outages using Cassandra. At our organization, we heavily rely on Kafka for real-time data processing and messaging. However, like any technology, Kafka is susceptible to occasional outages which can disrupt our operations and impact our services. To mitigate the impact of such outages and ensure continuity, we are exploring the possibility of leveraging Cassandra as a backup solution. Our proposed approach involves storing messages in Cassandra during Kafka outages. Subsequently, we plan to implement a scheduler that will read from Cassandra and attempt to write these messages back into Kafka once it is operational again. We believe that by adopting this strategy, we can achieve the following benefits: 1. Improved Fault Tolerance: By having a backup mechanism in place, we can reduce the risk of data loss and ensure continuity of operations during Kafka outages. 2. Enhanced Reliability: Cassandra's distributed architecture and built-in replication features make it well-suited for storing data reliably, even in the face of failures. 3. Scalability: Both Cassandra and Kafka are designed to scale horizontally, allowing us to handle increased loads seamlessly. Before proceeding further with this approach, we would greatly appreciate any feedback, suggestions, or concerns from the community. Specifically, we are interested in hearing about: * Potential challenges or drawbacks of using Cassandra as a backup solution for Kafka outages. * Best practices or recommendations for implementing such a backup mechanism effectively. * Any alternative approaches or technologies that we should consider? Your expertise and insights are invaluable to us, and we are eager to learn from your experiences and perspectives. Please feel free to share your thoughts or reach out to us with any questions or clarifications. Thank you for taking the time to consider our proposal, and we look forward to hearing from you soon. Thanks and regards, Gowtham S
