SmartThings First 8 Years with Cassandra

SmartThings has been using Cassandra in production for the last 8 years for several use cases. We have clusters that have been running uninterrupted for the whole 8 years.

Overall we run more than 300 nodes in production across more than 10 clusters. That includes 2 clusters that span the globe.

Cassandra’s usage at SmartThings has always been a deep partnership between the teams operating Cassandra and the feature teams using it to build the platform. We will discuss how feature teams interact with and choose Cassandra for some workloads. And share choices feature teams made over the years that have left some interesting sharp edges we rediscovered later.

We will also cover in detail how our operations have evolved, talking about what led us to stop some practices and start others. Just because we stopped doing something doesn’t mean it won’t be useful to others with different constraints.

We’ve also done a few data center migrations over the years; while they can be a big deal, they are a great time to make certain improvements to your cluster easily.

A joint talk with Colleen Velo

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