Take a bow Planet Cassandra

Change is inevitable and sometimes really hard. Today we are shutting down one of the earliest and most respected voices in the Apache Cassandra® community, Planet Cassandra. In the early years of the Apache Cassandra® project, the first question on everyone's mind was “does this technology even work?” There were a lot of NoSQL projects all trying to pull ahead of the pack. We built Planet Cassandra as a resource for engineers looking for how-to blogs, drivers and use case stories from the community. Tens of thousands of users visited Planet Cassandra every month and the effort paid off. When you saw the great stories from companies like Netflix, Spotify, eBay and Instagram, it’s clear you were inspired. The growth of Apache Cassandra® has been phenomenal and nobody asks if this is a legitimate technology anymore.

The Developer Relations team at DataStax was the group responsible for all that great content: interviewing users, inviting blog posts, and creating original articles for Planet Cassandra. That team is now shifting their attention to educating users at DataStax Academy, and as a result Planet Cassandra has not had the attention and focus it once had. We have also heard from a few community members that despite our best efforts, Planet Cassandra is inherently not vendor neutral.

To provide a smooth transition for the community, we are donating the domain to the Apache Cassandra® project. We hope it will live on as a resource for the community for years to come in its new home. We want to thank all the contributors throughout the years. They say content is king and because of the volunteer effort by members of the community, Planet Cassandra has been fortunate to have content that other communities have envied. There are too many people and companies in our community to call out all by name that made this site so valuable and popular, but tonight we’ll raise a glass of pumpkin juice to all of you who donated a use case via a five-minute interview, gave a sample data model to help others, posted your presentations, authored guides on how to migrate from other technologies, and tips on how to get the most out of Apache Cassandra®, or like DataScale, provided a shell on Planet Cassandra to get users started in seconds. I love how this community has, time and again, tirelessly worked to attract more developers to use the best, most scalable database platform in the world.

Happy Halloween!

Patrick McFadin