Instaclustr announces immediate availability of a preview release of Apache Cassandra 4.0 on the Instaclustr Managed Platform. This release is designed to allow Instaclustr customers to easily undertake any application-specific testing of Apache Cassandra 4.0 (alpha 3) in preparation for the forthcoming GA release of Apache Cassandra 4.0.

Apache Cassandra 4.0, as the first major release of Apache Cassandra for more than 2 years, is a major step forward for the Apache Cassandra community. Key features in Apache Cassandra 4.0 include:

• non-blocking IO for internode communication—this has provide significant performance improvements in both user query tail-end latency and streaming operations;
• virtual tables—providing the ability to retrieve performance metrics and other; metadata directly via CQL rather than requiring external tools;
• audit logging—the ability to log queries that are executed for compliance purposes; and
• many (generally minor but adding up) stability and testing improvements.

While Cassandra 4.0 is still in an alpha release phase and not yet ready for production usage, Instaclustr is making this preview release available for several reasons:

1. Building it into our automated provisioning system was a prerequisite to beginning our own validation testing of the 4.0 stream using our Certified Cassandra Framework, and thus allowing us to be ready to release a full GA release of Cassandra 4.0 on our managed platform as soon as Cassandra 4.0 is ready.
2. This preview release provides customers an easy path to start to undertake their own application-specific validation of Cassandra 4.0, and interacting with Instaclustr Support to debug any specific issues they may come across.

Being a preview release (of an alpha release of Apache Cassandra), this release has several limitations:

• It is not supported for production usage and not covered by SLAs. The release should be used for testing purposes only;
• It does not support Password Authentication, User Authorization, and Client to Node encryption (TLS);
• CounterMutationStage, ViewMutationStage and DroppedMessage Monitoring does not report results;

• The following add-ons are not supported:
  • Zeppelin
  • Spark
  • Lucene Index
  • Continuous Backup
    

We will be working to remove these limitations prior to a final release of Cassandra 4.0.

We look forward to working with our customers in this validation phase of Cassandra 4.0. Should you have any issues or questions please contact [email protected].