DataStax Delivers Stargate v2: Unlocking Apache Cassandra Data to Serve Billions of Devices in Real Time   

DataStax, the real-time data company, announced the launch of Stargate v2, a new version of the award-winning open-source data gateway that gives application developers the freedom to build real-time applications for Apache Cassandra® using their API of choice. Stargate v2, which is available as open-source software and part of DataStax’s Astra DB database-as-a-service, now features a high-performance gRPC API that enables developers to easily scale Cassandra data to serve billions of global devices with speed, in real-time.

“To ensure that our customers have timely access to data and insights, we’ve tapped on DataStax’s solutions – the Astra DB’s managed Cassandra database and Stargate gRPC API – as they are high-performance and easy-to-use,” said Deepak Kumar, VP of Engineering, SHIELD.

First introduced in 2020, Stargate makes the power of Cassandra – the world’s most scalable database – easily accessible by any developer through access to a broad range of APIs, including JSON, CQL, GraphQL, REST, and gRPC APIs. For example, with the JSON Document API, developers can use Cassandra as a NoSQL Document database, alongside the traditional wide-column database model, empowering developers to pick the NoSQL database model that best suits their needs.

Stargate v2: A gateway to simplicity, scalability, and extensibility

Development simplicity: With this launch, Stargate introduces high-performance gRPC. This brings the limitless scale of Cassandra to applications, serverless functions, and services over HTTP at native driver-wire speed. Stargate v2 provides developers with an easier-to-learn approach than native drivers and vastly superior performance than any web API.  CQL over gRPC is now the fastest-growing way to query DataStax Astra DB; the Stargate gRPC interface is a transport for CQL queries, preserving developers’ existing CQL skills.

Operational scalability: Stargate is now fully clouded native with new node types that bring modular, service-oriented architecture to Apache Cassandra. The v2 architecture lets developers scale usage and tune performance more granularly by making each service independently deployable, using dedicated node types for data storage, query coordination, and API services. When running on Kubernetes or K8ssandra, these independent API and coordinator services are deployable as their own pod and are fully Kubernetes compatible.

Extensibility: Adding a new API service on Stargate is now much simpler using the gRPC bridge API. With this purpose-built extension point, there is no need to learn the entire Stargate code base in order to adapt Cassandra to the APIs and data serialization formats an organization uses.

“Netlify customers have a long history of building database-driven sites by serving dynamic content, saving user-generated content, and building dashboards, e-commerce functionality, and SaaS applications,” said Akram Hassan, VP of Product, Netlify. “Bringing up a new application can be time-consuming and frustrating. With the Stargate GraphQL API and future Netlify Graph integration, developers can get the data they need into their apps — directly from Cassandra, allowing for the fast development of real-time data applications.”

“Given our growth with more than two million app downloads, three million tests taken, and 200 million hours of educational videos viewed, we needed high-performance data solutions to scale with us and drive efficiencies for our DevOps team,” said Vitul Goyal, CTO, PrepLadder.

“DataStax Astra DB cost-effectively supports our write-intensive workloads with great speed, while the Stargate REST API accelerates our development efforts so that we can rapidly deliver new and improved features for our learners.”

“This year downloads of open source Stargate for Apache Cassandra 4.0 have increased 7x,” said Ed Anuff, CPO, DataStax. “Stargate is empowering developers to pick the data model that best suits their needs and evolve it dynamically, leveraging the power of Cassandra – the most scalable database in existence. With Stargate, developers no longer have to learn everything in order to do anything. They can focus on their particular areas of expertise and interest as they develop high-growth applications.”

Industry Recognition

Stargate was recently awarded the 2022 API Award in the Best in Data APIs category.  The 2022 API Awards celebrate the incredible technical innovation, adoption, and reception in the API &  Microservices industries and use by a global developer community. The 2022 API Awards received hundreds of nominations, and the Advisory Board to the API Awards has selected our product/technology based on three criteria:  attracting notable attention and awareness in the API industry; general regard and use by the developer & engineering community; and being a technical leader in its sector for innovation.

“Stargate APIs (Astra DB) is helping engineers and API professionals build the future of APIs and the API economy in the multi-trillion-dollar market for API-driven products and services,” said Jonathan Pasky, Executive Producer & Co-Founder of DevNetwork, producer of API:World & the 2022 API Awards. “Today’s cloud-based software and hardware are increasingly powered by API-centric architecture and platforms. Stargate APIs (Astra DB)’s win here at the 2022 API Awards is evidence of their leading role in the growth of the global API ecosystem.”

Availability

Stargate v2 is available as free open-source software on Github, and as part of DataStax’s fully managed database-as-a-service, DataStax Astra DB.  It’s also now available on the Postman API Network, and available soon in the Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services Marketplace for GKE/EKS.