Instaclustr is pleased to announce immediate available for a new “production-tiny” node size, starting at $250 / month on-demand. The production-tiny size is based on the AWS m4.large instance size (2 CPU, 8GB RAM) with 250GB of attached EBS. The production-tiny size is the entry level into our production size offerings with full production SLAs and support.

The production-tiny nodes are an affordable, reliable starting point for an application that is starting off with a with a low load while giving you the surety that you can take advantage of Cassandra’s unlimited scalability to meet whatever load you grow to in the future. These nodes will provide a little less than half the performance of our standard m4.xl based EBS offerings (see: https://www.instaclustr.com/blog/2015/10/28/cassandra-on-aws-ebs-infrastructure/).

The major advantage of the production-tiny sizes over the cheaper, t2-based developer node sizes is that they are not subject to CPU credit limiting. Using the t2-based nodes for production purposes is very dangerous as when they are under a sustained load they can become CPU limited (to 30% of pre-limiting CPU) which will drastically reduce throughput and performance right when you need it the most.

In general, our recommended scaling path for clusters using the production-tiny nodes will be to first of all scale up to the m4.xl-based production sizes and then, once you get to production-balanced (800GB) or production-bulk (1600GB), scale-out by adding more nodes to the cluster. These scaling operations can all be carried out with zero downtime for your cluster.

Should you have any questions regarding this new node size, please contact [email protected].