Open-source managed solutions-as-a-service company Instaclustr wants to address some gaps in a few key integrations for the Apache Cassandra database management solution with the announcement of three new open-source projects.
The first piece of the problem was finding a way for Kubernetes to more fully integrate with Cassandra. This is where the company’s newly announced open-source Cassandra operator comes in, it explained. “While running Cassandra on Kubernetes can be relatively simple to begin with, Kubernetes provides only a limited understanding of database functionality: it’s blind to key details of the database being written to, and has incomplete capabilities for storing data in-state,” the company wrote in the release announcement.
The Cassandra operator was designed to provide a consistent environment and best practice operations set so managing deployment and operations is less reliant on the user, allowing them to focus on product development, the company said.
Instaclustr also found that that its customers had need for LDAP integration in Cassandra, and answered with another open-source solution — the LDAP authenticator plugin, which works with Cassandra’s existing authentication tool, CassandraAuthorization, to set up secure LDAP connections with zero downtime and without having to code a solution themselves.
The last of Instaclustr’s open-source releases is the Keberos authenticator, which provides secure single sign-on for Cassandra developers, and also comes in a version that supports the Cassandra Java driver.
“Our commitment to delivering 100% open source data-layer solutions for our managed platform extends to the development of new open source tools – especially when we recognize specific needs felt by our customers,” Ben Bromhead, CTO of Instaclustr, said in the release announcement. “With these open source projects, we’ve set out to empower any developer who wishes to pair Cassandra with Kubernetes, or take advantage of LDAP or Kerberos authentication within their Cassandra deployments. We invite anyone interested to join our community of contributors, and suggest or offer improvements to these open source projects.”
All of the projects are available at Instaclustr’s GitHub page.