Alice Lottini

Migrating to new technology while keeping the business operational is a challenge faced by many organizations. This is particularly true for enterprises that use Apache Cassandra&reg; or other CQL-compatible databases, which are typically relied upon for continuous availability. Eliminating downtime when migrating client applications between clusters is a challenge that we've seen again and again.
This is why we <a href="https://www.datastax.com/blog/accelerate-application-modernization-with-the-zero-downtime-migration-suite">released</a> the Zero Downtime Migration (ZDM) suite, which enables you to easily move your client applications from one cluster to another with no service interruptions.&nbsp;
Today, we&rsquo;re excited to offer a <a href="https://www.datastax.com/dev/zdm">new, interactive and hands-on lab</a> that will guide you through a migration from a Cassandra cluster to a cluster on DataStax Astra DB using the ZDM suite.&nbsp;
<h2>Migrating, minus the downtime</h2>
The ZDM suite is an open-source set of tools and a powerful asset in your toolkit when you need to:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Move an application from a shared cluster to a dedicated one</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Aggregate multiple applications onto a shared cluster</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Upgrade your cluster to a newer version, or new infrastructure, in as little as one step, leaving your existing cluster untouched until the end</li>
</ul>
Maybe you want to move your application to Astra DB and forget about having to do upgrades, repairs, and other operations on your cluster. Astra DB is a serverless, multi-cloud database service built on Cassandra, and thus optimized for real-time applications that require large data volume, low latency, and flexible data models. Astra DB makes it easy to deploy and manage databases that scale automatically with demand, on the cloud provider of your choice.
Whatever your destination, migrating a critical application without users noticing is no mean feat. This is where the ZDM suite shines. This suite has already enabled enterprises like Hornet, MegaZebra, and WellAware to successfully migrate all kinds of critical applications for which even a brief downtime window would not be an option.&nbsp;
The team at MegaZebra was able to migrate their applications without affecting their customers' experience, moving 1+TB of data to Astra DB using ZDM.&nbsp;
&ldquo;We worked really closely with the DataStax team to ensure that our new implementation would future-proof our approach and ensure our players did not see any impact from the move,&rdquo; says Henning Kosmack, CEO at MegaZebra. &ldquo;We were able to implement exactly as we planned.&rdquo;
<h2>The ZDM interactive scenario: a fun way to learn!</h2>
Curious to learn how this works in practice? The interactive scenario we&rsquo;ve put together will guide you end-to-end through a migration from a Cassandra cluster to an Astra DB cluster using the ZDM suite and explain each step in the process.
This is a hands-on lab that you can run from just your browser. There are no system requirements, you won't need to set up any infrastructure, download resources or VMs, or install any software on your machine. All you need is a compatible browser, a GitHub account and you're all set!
Ready to get started?&nbsp; <a href="https://www.datastax.com/dev/zdm">Dive into the Zero Downtime Migration Interactive Lab now!</a>

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