How is 10ms vs 475 not a major improvement? How is 4 nodes vs 40 not a major improvement? If you're an SRE than how is managing 4 servers with far less tuning and maintenance not a major improvement? Also 99.9% percentile still matters. They're testing with 300k ops/sec which means 300/sec are facing extreme latency spikes that can be enough to fail and/or cause cascading issues through out the application.
There's no metric where Cassandra is better here and you can't tune your way to the same performance in the first place which is the whole point of Scylla. What even is your claim here? Spend more to get less?
What makes it possible to run cassandra/scylla on nodes with TBs of data density is the TWCS compaction strategy from Jeff Jirsa. He was just a cassandra power user at the time, and I like to think that the invention was possible because of Java.
So, next time you read an ad piece from scylla about replacing 40 mid size boxes running CMS with 4 big boxes, don't forget about TWCS.
Scylla is far more than a compaction strategy. If it was that simple, than Cassandra would already be able to do it.
It's an objectively faster database in every metric. Datastax's enterprise distribution has more functionality but core Cassandra is now entirely outclassed by Scylla in speed and features.
The TWCS is just a good example that raw performance is not everything. Performance also comes from things like compaction strategy, data modeling, and access pattern, while users and stakeholders also care about things like easiness to modify, friendly license, and steady stewardship.
Redpanda uses the Seastar framework which was created by the ScyllaDB project. Scylla is high-performance C++ reimplemation of Cassandra and RedPanda seems to be chasing the same thing as an alternative to Kafka/JVM.
As a 12 year adtech veteran who has built ad networks from scratch 3 times, low-latency and high-throughput are critical to ad serving infrastructure and that's why Scylla is such a better alternative to Cassandra. The only other database that gets close is Aerospike, and possibly Redis Enterprise with Flash persistence. It's entirely valid to want similar improvements for event streams as well, and as long as they keep the same external API then you don't lose any of the ecosystem advantages either.
See Gil Tene's talk on how not to measure latency.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJ8ydIuPFeU
What matters is what most of your customers will get - p99, p999, p9999, p100.
For any decent SRE out there.
>> magnitudes more performance which is not possible by just tuning Cassandra
Magnitudes?? Are you talking about the order of magnitude? You should read the ScyllaDB performance report first.
https://www.scylladb.com/product/benchmarks/aws-i3-metal-ben...
Avg. 99.9% Latency (ms): 9.9
vs.
Avg. 99.9% Latency (ms): 474.4
While there is no significant latency difference in lover percentile tiers. Where Scylla really shines is TCO. Some companies trade SRE time for license cost, some other companies tune GC.