Cassandra is a highly scalable distributed database that we use in a variety of applications. It powers such things as loading the Disqus comment system, to our real-time Promoted Discovery product. We love the tool and have decided to help users of Cassandra get better connected to the community by hosting the Datastax Cassandra SF Users meetup at Disqus HQ.
Our meetup is designed to allow expert speakers to share their experiences using the Cassandra database with the community. The meetup is a great opportunity to network with other Cassandra users and learn from knowledgeable speakers, discussing a wide variety of topics, from data modeling to cluster management.
We’ve had a few hundred people hosted at Disqus so far and the reception has been really great. We started the series with a talk detailing advanced time-series data-modeling here at Disqus. Over the last 6 months we’ve had Cassandra legends such as Rick Branson from Instagram talking about challenges scaling Justin Bieber’s activity stream, Michael Kjellman from Barracuda Networks imparting sage-like wisdom about owning the Cassandra code in order to continuously deploy, and Tim Moreton from Acunu enlightening us about the ability to build shiny OLAP cubes of data on top of Acunu’s brand of Cassandra.
In the coming months we’re excited to share some of the not-so-top-secret caching work that Disqus has started implementing on top of Cassandra. The project is appropriately code-named casscached. We’re hoping that it will give memcached a run for it’s money.
Our next meeting is happening on Tuesday, December 17th. Our meetups are always open to the public so make sure you register to secure your spot. The next meetup will be an epic tag-team duo of Cassandra power houses Al Tobey and Kyle Kingsbury.
Your friendly neighborhood C* enthusiast,
George