Hi all, I’m validating an approach around Cassandra-native OpenSearch indexing.
The use case is teams that keep Cassandra as the source of truth but also need search/query patterns that Cassandra does not support well. Today this is usually handled through CDC, Kafka, custom dual-writes, Spark jobs, periodic backfills, or some other external indexing path into OpenSearch/Elasticsearch. The problem I’m looking at is operational rather than theoretical: - indexing lag - missed or duplicated updates - reindexing/backfill complexity - consistency drift between Cassandra and the search layer - recovery after failed consumers or partial writes - operational burden of running the sync pipeline I’m trying to understand whether this is a serious production pain for Cassandra users, or whether most teams are satisfied with external indexing pipelines. For teams running Cassandra with OpenSearch or Elasticsearch downstream: 1. What architecture are you using today? 2. Where does the indexing path fail in practice? 3. Is search freshness/consistency business-critical or just a tolerable limitation? 4. Would a tighter Cassandra-integrated indexing layer be interesting, or would that create too much operational risk? 5. What benchmark, failure-mode test, or compatibility proof would make you willing to evaluate an alternative? I’m looking for blunt technical feedback before overbuilding anything. Thanks, Maxim
