ApacheCon 2019 Highlights with Patrick McFadin and Jeff Carpenter | Ep. 117 Distributed Data Show

Summary: Patrick McFadin and Jeff Carpenter recap their favorite talks and hallway conversations from ApacheCon North America 2019 including DataStax announcements from the keynote by DataStax CTO Jonathan Ellis. Highlights: 0:00 - Enough talk - lets fight! 1:53 - Next Generation Cassandra Conference (NGCC) - the conference within a conference. Thanks to the Apache Software Foundation for making space. 3:42 - NGCC was focused around Cassandra 4.0 including the release of the first alpha and the testing that will be required to get to a full release. 5:33 - One presentation was around transient replicas, a new experimental feature in 4.0. 6:55 - Joey Lynch and Vinay Chella from Netflix spoke about the sidecar project 7:58 - Ben Bromhead from Instaclustr talked about Cassandra community health including the good (recent upturn in contributions) and the bad (average JIRA age). There are some low hanging fruit that would be a great way for new contributors to start. 10:38 - Scott Andreas from Apple proposed a Cassandra improvement process and some other ideas to improve project management for Cassandra. 13:30 - Cassandra MVP Matija Gobec talked about a new partition-based compaction strategy and started talking with Netflix about a similar effort. 14:40 - Yuki from Scalar proposed an approach for building ACID transactions on top of Cassandra using the creatively named "Cherry Garcia" algorithm and Cassandra's Lightweight Transactions. 18:25 - Patrick is working with the project leadership to start bi-monthly user and developer meetings. 20:14 - Recapping Jonathan Ellis' keynote - DataStax commitment to open source in terms of code, content and community. 21:17 - Code - there will no longer be separate DataStax drivers for open source and DataStax Enterprise - there will soon be a single driver for each supported language, including many performance improvements that were previously only available when using DSE. 24:03 - (more Code) Also coming: prebuilt Python wheels and Spring Boot integration. 25:04 - (more Code!) DataStax Insights, the new cloud-based monitoring platform, will be offering a free tier for monitoring OSS Cassandra clusters. 27:08 - Content and community - reminding the community about our free content and community events including DataStax Academy, Cassandra Days, and... this show! 28:34 - in his talk, Patrick announced a new Cassandra / Dynamo proxy available on the DataStax Labs website 31:30 - Other highlights included James Gosling's talk on the fight to keep Java open, and the renewed camaraderie in the Cassandra community. 33:35 - Interesting hallway conversations with open source innovators shopping for a home for their project, and a team using Python for their MVP microservice implementations. 36:13 - Look for some deep dive interviews from ApacheCon over the next few episodes.