A bit a changed since we first announced our new application for DataStax Astra, Cassandra as a service hosted on the cloud. In our earlier blog post, we walked you through how our program allows you to import data into Astra, how to set up a Node or Python API that will allow you to communicate with your Astra database and how to run unit tests test to ensure that you are connected properly. Since then, we’ve added added a read and write functionality to our APIs as well as user interface admin that will allow you to to visualize your Astra database. Let’s take a look at what is new with Cassandra.API.

Google Cloud Functions is a compute solution for developers to create single-purpose, stand-alone functions that respond to cloud events without the need to manage a server or runtime environment, this is why Cloud Functions are considered serverless architecture.

Cloud Functions for Firebase provides a way to extend the behavior of Firebase and integrate Firebase features through the addition of server-side code. It is a joint product between the Google Cloud Platform team and the Firebase team.

In the year 2000, I was lucky enough to get flown to LinuxWorld for free. I was just learning open source development and the Linux Operating System. What I saw & learned at the conference as an 18 year old convinced me of two fundamental facts. (Read the full story to find out how I got there for free!)

1. Open source can thrive in the market place in the “Bazaar” model.

2. Open source can only thrive because community members contribute more to the community than just code.

Earlier this year, DataStax announced DataStax Astra: A Cassandra Database SaaS that provides the ability to develop and deploy data-driven applications with a cloud-native service, without the hassles of database and infrastructure administration. We had been looking forward to the launch of this service since we first heard about it, when it was initially called DataStax Constellation. Over the past month and a half, we’ve been working on a program that would allow anyone to get up and running on Astra in as little time as possible. In this blog post, we’re going to go over how our program allows you to import data into Astra, how to set up a Node or Python API that will allow you to communicate with your Astra database and how to run our curl/postman test to ensure that you are connected properly.

Apache Cassandra is a free and open-source NoSQL database management system that is designed to handle large amounts of data with no single point of failure. In this blog post, I’m going to highlight 3 different but useful tools that make life easier when using Apache Cassandra.