Summary: Jeff Carpenter talks with Jean Armel Luce about usage of Cassandra at French telecommunications provider Orange, all the way from their first work with Cassandra 2012 to their open-source Kubernetes operator for Cassandra which is expected to be production-ready in 2020. Highlights: 0:00 - Jeff welcomes Jean-Armel to the show. Orange has been using Cassandra since 2012. They started using this on their customer dataset which was multiple TB with 1000s of requests per second and were able to achieve higher throughput. 3:03 - Orange are also using Cassandra for storing security and infrastructure information. They are working on providing a Cassandra database as a service offering within Orange to better support teams which need dedicated clusters 5:27 - The overall results have been much higher availability and scalability, for example adding capacity without downtime and having active-active configurations in multiple data centers. 7:25 - The biggest challenge came from an application that was writing millions of tombstones into a Cassandra 2.1 cluster, which they discovered after three days. They had to execute a large compaction but were able to recover without downtime. 9:52 - Orange have built web services on top of Cassandra which provide RESTful key-value APIs on top of Cassandra. They've also developed their own graph database on top of Cassandra. 12:47 - Orange is running Cassandra in multiple data centers across France, and are investigating running Cassandra in public clouds. 13:45 - Orange have built their own automation tools based on Ansible, and are working on a Cassandra Kubernetes operator which they hope to production in 2020. They have open sourced this project at: https://github.com/Orange-OpenSource/cassandra-k8s-operator. 15:15 - They began working on the operator about two years ago. The operator currently supports the ability scale up and scale down, schedule repairs, and modify configuration parameters. 16:27 - The remaining work includes building a multi-region operator. 17:27 - They are also working to incorporate a service mesh to help with dissemination of encryption keys for Cassandra and other applications. They had some initial challenges when using Istio. 20:04 - Wrapping up
