DataStax announced the general availability of Astra serverless, an open, multi-cloud serverless database-as-a-service (DBaaS). DataStax’s Astra will deliver pay-as-you-go data together with multi-cloud and open source. DataStax Astra builds upon the Apache Cassandra open source database and introduces a modern, microservices-based architecture that separates compute from storage, enabling database resources to scale up and down on demand to match application requirements and traffic independent of compute resources.
While serverless compute has been around for a while, serverless data has lagged due to the technical challenges around separating compute and storage. Scaling a database typically requires the addition of more server nodes in order to handle more demand or to store more data, which, in turn, requires that the entire data set is “rebalanced” across the nodes to keep the ratio of storage and computing capability equal. With the introduction of Astra serverless, developers will only pay for what they use, no matter how many database clusters they create and deploy. This flexibility brings faster application development and streamlined operations by letting developers and IT create as many databases as they need for development, testing, staging, or any other purpose.
