Presenter: Puneet Oberai, Senior Software Engineer at Netflix In this session, we'll cover a quick introduction to the Astyanax Java client driver, powerful features, comparison to Java Driver and what to do with CQL3.

1. Astyanax
To be or not to be
#CassandraSummit2014
Puneet Oberai, Netflix

2. Puneet Oberai
Senior Software Engineer - Netflix, Inc
Previously at Amazon Web Services (AWS)
@opuneet

3. https://github.com/Netflix/astyanax
Image - http://www.artandarchitecture.org.uk/images/
conway/3f324eee.html

4. Top Level Features
• Load balancing
• Connection pooling - resilient with failover and retries
• Pluggable host discovery mechanism
• Metrics (there are a lot!)
• Highly configurable and pluggable

5. Fluent Query Syntax
Mutation Batch

6. Fluent Query Syntax
Row Query with column slice (reverse sorting)

7. Recipes
• All Rows Reader
• Distributed Row Lock
• Chunked Object Store

8. How Does Netflix Use Astyanax

9. Java Driver Release
• Async interface!
• Cursor support
• Collections
• Flexible retry policies
• And everything else in CQL ..

10. BUT WHAT ABOUT THRIFT !!??
I’M STILL USING IT.
No worries, Astyanax still works over thrift J

11. New features only available via CQL / native
protocol

12. Is this a carrot or a stick?

13. 900+ devs need to refactor their code

14. Bear and stick is not a good idea!

15. No wait! Astyanax has a new adaptor
• Built on top of Java Driver
• All your queries are now async
• Astyanax APIs (structured queries) are supported
• All Astyanax recipes work

16. Much better adoption model!

17. Astyanax Can Use Both Drivers

18. What About Performance?
If you use prepared statements, you’re good!
More findings on our blog
http://techblog.netflix.com/2013/12/astyanax-update.html

19. Prepared Statements
• There is no magic here
• You “prepare”
• Then you re-use
For generic DAOs this means - prepared statement
management.

20. Astyanax Value Add
Structured Queries Naturally Have Some
Query Signature
keyspace.prepareQuery( myCF )!
.withRow( myRowKey )!
.withColumnSlice( start, end)!
.execute();!
Translates to
select * from ks.myCF where key=? and column1 =? and
column1 =?;

21. But wait! Something is not right with the new
model
• Are columns
really columns?
• Are rows still
rows?
• Are columns
really rows?

22. Simple Schema
key validator – int
col comparator – int
default validator – utf8

23. Rows Are Now Transposed

24. Astyanax preserves original semantics
• Astyanax maintains backwards compatibility
with the api
• Hence rows are still rows and columns are
still columns

25. Takeaway for Astyanax
Apps really care about high level abstractions
• Time series
• Sliding window
• Objects with attribute based indexing

26. So What Should I Use?
• Astyanax presents a higher level abstraction
• Astyanax has recipes
• Astyanax is good for structured queries
• If all you want is CQL3, then use Java Driver

27. Questions
http://github.com/Netflix/astyanax
https://jobs.netflix.com