Cassandra Status Inside Facebook, Twitter, Digg, and More
As everyone probably knows by now, Cassandra was originated at Facebook as a solution for inbox search and then open sourced under the ASF umbrella and an Apache license. Since then, Twitter, Digg, Reddit and quite a few others started using it, but not much have been heard from Facebook.
So, in case you are wondering ☞ what’s up with Cassandra here’s a very concise update:
- Twitter and Digg are not planning to fork the project. In fact there are clear plans to contribute back their work on Cassandra (see this for more details)
- Facebook is still using Cassandra internally for the inbox search, but they are using their own version
- even if except the initial code share Facebook has stopped contributing to the Cassandra project, the community on ASF is doing well (read growing)
- Riptano, the company founded by Cassandra project lead Jonathan Ellis and Matt Pfeil, is offering technical support, professional services, and training for Cassandra
Update: interesting ☞ note (dated July 7th) from Twitter’s engineer, Nick Kallen:
Twitter no longer intends to use Cassandra for any critical data-stores in the near term future.