Just months after making its managed Astra Streaming service generally available, DataStax on Wednesday said that it was launching the second version of its open-source data API gateway, dubbed Stargate V2, and making it available via its serverless, NoSQL database-as-a-service (DBaaS) Astra DB.
The company launched Stargate in 2020 and open-sourced it because of what it calls “read the manual fatigue” on its GitHub page. The idea was to steer away from the approach of creating different APIs for different databases and develop a framework that can serve APIs for a variety of workloads.
Essentially, Stargate converts data from the Apache Cassandra open-source database into a JSON Document DB and automatically exposes the database via secure web APIs, the company said. Essentially, DataStax is a supported enterprise version of Cassandra, featuring improvements for performance, security, and other database-related issues.
The new version of the open-source data API gateway comes with a gRPC API that will enable developers to scale Apache Cassandra data limitlessly, the company said. gPRC is an open source remote procedure call (RPC) framework, created by Google in 2016, that can run in any environment to connect services in and across data centers with pluggable support for load balancing, tracing, health checking and authentication.
A remote procedure call can be defined as a connecting protocol that can be used to request a service or process to be executed in a different address space. The protocol codes the request in such a way that it mimics a generic request from a local system.
Features of Stargate V2
Developers can continue to use Cassandra Query Language (CQL) inside the gRPC interface, DataStax said, adding that V2’s architecture will allow developers to scale usage and tune performance in a granular manner.
“When running on Kubernetes or K8ssandra, these independent API and coordinator services are deployable as their own pod and are fully Kubernetes compatible,” the company said in a statement.
The new version of the data API gateway also adds the gRPC bridge API extension, the company said, adding that this is targeted toward developers so that they don’t have to learn the Stargate code base in order to adapt Cassandra to the APIs and data serialization formats an enterprise chooses to use.
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