57 engineers on Hacker News describe using Apache Cassandra first-hand: 9 endorse it, 10 regret it, 8 are mixed.
“Having to write code that can handle foreign key violations because the DB doesn't check it is a major pain.”
regret · production · Knufferlbert · 2023-12-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Request latency reduced, as did the number of nodes we required.”
regret · production · secondcoming · 2021-03-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“It is just not worth it. For example, we winded up using MongoDb and it turned out to be fast, scalable, had mature tooling”
regret · personal · SMFloris · 2021-02-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I still have scars to show from the time I tried to get cassandra into our production systems”
regret · production · gofreddygo · 2020-12-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we switched from Cassandra (JVM) to Scylla (C++). It was a win in terms of both query latency and infrastructure costs”
regret · production · dirtydroog · 2020-05-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we switched from Cassandra (JVM) to Scylla (C++). It was a win in terms of both query latency and infrastructure costs”
regret · production · _ph_ · 2020-05-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I have run Cassandra in production. A replication factor 3 cluster over 3 AZs should be able to survive loss of a single AZ.”
mixed · production · psanford · 2019-12-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Cassandra was hard to manage and after many years of our team using it still had random spikes.”
mixed · production · 3 yr · tschellenbach · 2019-12-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“cassandra was brilliant. However, it collapsed like a sack of poop as soon as you wanted to do any kind of reading”
mixed · production · KaiserPro · 2019-07-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We struggled with most, but we used or test MongoDB, Cassandra (including ScyllaDB)”
regret · personal · doh · 2017-10-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Cassandra is REALLY good at this”
endorse · production · Vishnevskiy · 2017-01-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Mainly we use Cassandra to handle rate-limiting across multi region and because it's also easy to scale horizontally.”
endorse · production · sinzone · 2015-07-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we used Cassandra with so many surprises, often learned the hard way with bugs in production... before we succeed to setup a reliable, efficient and scalable system.”
mixed · production · dwenzek · 2015-06-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we run a huge Cassandra install in multi dacenters on GCP. And we're good.”
endorse · production · samkone · 2015-06-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we run Cassandra clusters in Docker and have no trouble.”
endorse · production · eigenrick · 2014-11-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use C* for other large datasets, I do wish we could just use that.”
mixed · production · Xorlev · 2014-11-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We switched to Cassandra because of the control it offers over how your data is laid out on disk”
endorse · production · bdeggleston · 2014-08-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We had a 5 node cluster in Mongo that we moved to Cassandra last summer.”
mixed · production · nemothekid · 2014-03-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Cassandra has turned out to be much more performant and easier to maintain for our use case.”
endorse · production · dev360 · 2013-11-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I foolishly self-inflicted Cassandra on myself. Never again.”
regret · production · nknighthb · 2013-11-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“cassandra was an easier way to go about it and it works for us for now.”
endorse · production · zengr · 2013-11-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We migrated from MongoDB (on SSDs) to Cassandra for similar reasons.”
endorse · production · nemothekid · 2013-08-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Counter increments began impacting other database operations and the nodes would become unresponsive.”
regret · production · 1 yr · mnutt · 2013-08-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“where I currently work we use a ton of Cassandra, Redis, and very little MySQL on the side”
endorse · production · bretthoerner · 2012-11-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We're (Inkling) successfully using Cassandra in production to store most of our data.”
mixed · production · jforman · 2010-12-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I find Cassandra to considerably immature having weird bugs that cause it to outright crash”
regret · personal · gmjosack · 2010-07-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“after quite a lot of prototyping, we moved away from Cassandra. It scales brilliantly, but its query time has a pretty solid floor”
mixed · personal · seldo · 2010-07-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“a bare metal Cassandra cluster in the same rack makes a big difference in performance”
neutral · production · physix · 2025-08-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“it's a home-grown distributed system that's built on top of Postgres and Cassandra with a whole control plane and data plane.”
neutral · production · chriscbr · 2025-08-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“It took me three years before I could fully automate a cassandra cluster in multiple regions”
neutral · production · 3 yr · AtlasBarfed · 2021-12-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“it was cassandra at the time of rewrite, scylla now since we've migrated our data stores over”
neutral · production · jhgg · 2021-02-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“HP machines hosting RHEL VM's running TIBCO, JAVA and Cassandra. Similar load as you mention.”
neutral · production · leokennis · 2020-08-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Well, we moved to it from Cassandra.”
neutral · production · dirtydroog · 2020-03-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we use a combination of Keyvi, Granne (both in-house) along with Cassandra and RocksDB.”
neutral · production · ssubu · 2019-12-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I have used MSSQL, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Mongo and Cassandra all as primary data stores.”
neutral · production · davismwfl · 2018-12-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run a lot on aws. Services, databases, ... Cassandra, Aerosoike, Couchbase, DynamoDB to name a few.”
neutral · production · LaserToy · 2018-12-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“the majority of the comparisons/benchmarks we've run have been against MemSQL+Spark and Cassandra+Spark”
neutral · production · plamb · 2017-10-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run both CDH and Cassandra at my employer.”
neutral · production · coredog64 · 2017-05-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“have our data services (Elasticsearch, Cassandra, MySQL, MongoDB) join the rest of our apps on Kube-orchestrated infrastructure”
neutral · production · chrissnell · 2016-12-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been a Cassandra user for 5+ years and have been watching the drama unfold on the mailing lists”
neutral · production · 5 yr · helper · 2016-11-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Cassandra for an AP store. ... Replacing Cassandra at Yelp would be a lot of effort”
neutral · production · jolynch · 2016-06-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“(we are a C* shop) and use ELK for text logs.”
neutral · production · coredog64 · 2016-05-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we moved to Cassandra instead of Postgres only with great trepidation (we were worried about scalability issues).”
neutral · production · squidlogic · 2015-11-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“is a time series datastore with aggregation and rest APIs built on top of Cassandra. It's production ready and in fact used in production at Rackspace”
neutral · production · lnkmails · 2015-06-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we're doing some stuff with Cassandra and BigQuery for bulk analysis of historical data.”
neutral · production · cheald · 2014-12-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“In production I've used Oracle DB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, DynamoDB, Cassandra, Google Cloud Datastore, Redis, RedShift and Elasticsearch.”
neutral · production · nielskrijger · 2014-10-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“It uses Cassandra under the hood. It's a project out of Rackspace and is being used in prod by Rackspace's cloud monitoring.”
neutral · production · tilogaat · 2014-09-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Erlang, haproxy, rabbitmq, redis, postgres, cassandra, chef”
neutral · production · metabrew · 2013-11-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“All the irc messages end up in cassandra, via rabbitmq. Our cassandra cluster is on EC2”
neutral · production · metabrew · 2013-11-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Now our requirements slowly changed and it became harder to fit everything in memory (or fallback) that's why we switched to Cassandra.”
neutral · production · tschellenbach · 2013-10-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use PostgreSQL and Cassandra.”
neutral · production · natehark · 2012-11-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“At Instagram we use PostgreSQL, Redis, and Cassandra.”
neutral · production · rbranson · 2012-11-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“some Cassandra for newer things (not comments).”
neutral · production · zeeg · 2012-11-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We now run everything on ephemeral drives and use Cassandra distributed across multiple AZs and multiple regions for data persistence.”
neutral · production · helper · 2012-10-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we decided to try cassandra as a beefier replacement.”
neutral · production · keysersosa · 2012-10-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We replaced memcachedb with Cassandra a while ago, because memcachedb pretty much hit a wall at some point.”
neutral · production · jedberg · 2011-02-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We are using Cassandra to drive an API that must service thousands of requests a second but also with sub 100ms response times.”
neutral · production · bdwalter · 2010-10-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?