Lakshman and Prashant Malik develop Cassandra to power Facebook’s inbox search feature using large datasets across multiple servers. They name their database after the Trojan mythological 2007 prophet Cassandra - with classical allusions to a curse on an oracle. Avinash Lakshman and Prashant Malik Lakshman’s presentations and the team’s LADIS (Large Scale Distributed Systems) paper generate excitement in the distributed systems community.
Facebook releases Cassandra as an July
open source project on (now defunct) Google Code. 2008
Rackspace hires distributed systems
engineer Jonathan Ellis with a Nov-Dec mandate to build a next-generation 2008 scalable database. After evaluating the extant open source projects, he forms a small Cassandra group at the company.
Facebook, Lakshman, and Malik
contribute Cassandra to the Apache Jan Software Foundation, where it becomes 2009 an Apache Incubator project.
Jonathan Ellis becomes the first new
Mar committer to Cassandra in the 2009 Apache Incubator. His blogging activity and omnipresence on IRC make him the face of Cassandra to the community. Jonathan Ellis
Ellis is contacted by John Vrionis of
Lightspeed Ventures, who asks him if Apr he’s thought about starting a company 2009 around Apache Cassandra TM. Ellis had indeed begun to have these thoughts, John Vrionis but wasn’t quite ready to pull the trigger.
Twitter engineer Johan Oskarsson
announces a conference for scalable May databases in San Francisco. Cassandra 2009 committer Eric Evans suggests calling this a “NoSQL” conference, and the Johan Oskarsson term sticks.
Comcast engineers respond to a
Cassandra users survey conducted by Ellis. They evaluated Cassandra positively for a data-intensive project, Nov but corporate policy required having a 2009 company behind it that they could call for support. Ellis takes this as the sign he was looking for to start his own company based on Apache Cassandra.
Ellis convinces fellow Rackspace
Feb-Mar engineer Matt Pfeil to quit his job and 2010 cofound Riptano with him in Austin to commercialize Apache Cassandra. Jonathan Ellis and Matt Pfeil
Cassandra graduates from the
incubator and becomes a top-level Apr project of the Apache Foundation, with 2010 Jonathan Ellis as project chair.
Amid competition from multiple
July interested VC firms, Lightspeed 2010 Ventures leads Riptano’s Series A funding round.
Pfeil and Ellis decide to change Jan
Riptano’s name to DataStax. 2011
Ellis and Pfeil hire college football
player-turned-tech entrepreneur Billy May Bosworth as CEO to help manage the 2011 company’s hypergrowth and to get another round of investment, which was led by Crosslink Capital. Jonathan Ellis, Matt Pfeil and Billy Bosworth
The NoSQL data management market
explodes, with hundreds of start-ups All of 2011 NoSQL appearing in the space.
Apache Cassandra 1.0 is released, and
Oct so is Version 1 of DataStax Enterprise, the 2011 first integrated data platform with built-in analytics powered by Hadoop running on top of Apache Cassandra.
University of Toronto researchers
studying NoSQL systems conclude that "In terms of scalability, there is a clear winner throughout our experiments. Cassandra achieves the highest Aug throughput for the maximum number of 2012 nodes in all experiments" although "this comes at the price of high write and read latencies." Ellis is determined to fix this.
DataStax enters accelerated
development and Cassandra awareness mode, significantly advancing Cassandra’s capabilities and 2012- spreading the message about the power 2013 of Cassandra-based NoSQL data management throughout the tech world. They achieve adoption at many of Jonathan Ellis live conference Silicon Valley’s top tech companies, including Apple, Netflix, and Twitter. DataStax goes into growth mode, taking on a number of big-name customers, including Sony, eBay, Walmart, and FedEx, and going from plucky little startup to the cloud database 2013- market leader. 2017 DataStax engineers continue to develop Cassandra, making 85% of the code commits and accelerating Cassandra’s evolution through V. 3.11.
DataStax releases DataStax Enterprise 6,
May which is 2 times faster than open source 2018 Apache Cassandra while eliminating significant operational complexity.
