CASSANDRALONDON2014 • The world’s highest-rated taxi app – over 11,000 five-star reviews • Over 500,000 registered passengers • A Hailo hail is accepted around the world every 4 seconds • Hailo operates in 15 cities on 3 continents from Tokyo to Toronto in nearly 2 years of operation Facts and figures
CASSANDRALONDON2014 “NoSQL DBs trade off traditional features to better support new and emerging use cases” Andy Gross, Riak http://www.slideshare.net/argv0/riak-use-cases-dissecting-the-solutions-to-hard-problems
CASSANDRALONDON2014 A history lesson • Version 1 launched in London in November 2010 2 x PHP/MySQL web apps + 1 x Java/MySQL backend • Version 1.5 launched in Dublin, then 13 others Transitioning to global Java and PHP services built on C* • Version 2.0 launched 2013 Global Java/Go services built on C* running on a common platform
CASSANDRALONDON2014 Why Cassandra? • A desire for greater resilience – “become a utility” Cassandra is designed for high availability • Plans for international expansion around a single consumer app Cassandra is good at global replication • Expected growth Cassandra scales linearly for both reads and writes • Prior experience I had experience with Cassandra and could recommend it
CASSANDRALONDON2014 There will probably be an experience gap • Have an advocate - get someone who will sell the vision internally • Learn the theory - teach each team member the fundamentals • Make an effort to get everyone on board
CASSANDRALONDON2014 Watch out for drift • Cassandra can often be low maintenance – be pro-active • Keep enough disk space for compactions • Spot data model problems before they explode
CASSANDRALONDON2014 Lessons for successful adoption • Have an advocate, sell the dream • Learn the fundamentals, get the best out of Cassandra • Invest in tools to make life easier • Keep management in the loop, explain the trade offs
CASSANDRALONDON2014 The future • We will continue to invest in Cassandra as we expand globally • We will hire people with experience running Cassandra • We will focus on expanding our reporting facilities • We aspire to extend our network (1M consumer installs, wallet) beyond cabs • We will continue to hire the best engineers in London, NYC and Asia