Database Renaissance Man
Linux Format|November 2019
DataStax’s softly spoken co-founder Jonathan Ellis has  successfully made the transition from the cubicle to the  corner office.  Mayank Sharma grills him on databases.
Mayank Sharma
Database Renaissance Man

The Cassandra project doesn’t have a Benevolent Dictator For Life, but if it did that title would surely go to Jonathan Ellis. The co-founder of DataStax, Jonathan has been involved with Cassandra since the time it was open-sourced by Facebook. Once the project graduated from the incubator at the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), he served as its first Project Chair for the next six years. It was difficult to tear Jonathan from his fans at DataStax’s Accelerate conference in Washington, but Mayank Sharma lured him by disguising himself as one as well.

Linux Format: You’ve always been a database guy… How did you find your way to Apache Cassandra?

Jonathan Ellis: It’s true that I’ve always been interested in database technology, but I initially thought that the database space was just making incremental improvements on well-understood solutions until I joined a cloud backup company called Mozy in 2005. I built an object store there that scaled to petabytes of data and gigabits per second of throughput, and one of its features was single-instance storage. That is, no matter how many users uploaded the same video or the same binary, we’d only store one copy in the backup storage.

This in turn meant that we needed a way to track which users had copies of which files – scaling to millions of users and billions of files. That’s when I realised that we needed new database architectures to deal with the challenges of web and mobile applications. Existing databases were optimised for applications that dealt with a single company’s worth of users, but now we needed to scale to an entire country. It was a very different problem that required different trade-offs.

This story is from the November 2019 edition of Linux Format.

Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.

This story is from the November 2019 edition of Linux Format.

Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.

MORE STORIES FROM LINUX FORMATView All
Create your first WebSocket service
Linux Format

Create your first WebSocket service

Mihalis Tsoukalos explains how to use the Go programming language to work with the WebSocket protocol.

time-read
9 mins  |
April 2023
Fantastic Mr Firefox
Linux Format

Fantastic Mr Firefox

Nick Peers takes a trip down memory lane to reveal the story behind the rise - and slight fall - of Mozilla's popular web browser.

time-read
9 mins  |
April 2023
Set up your terminal and email like it's 1983
Linux Format

Set up your terminal and email like it's 1983

Jump in the hot terminal time machine with Mats Tage Axelsson who emails from the command line using the latest technology.

time-read
8 mins  |
April 2023
Universal layer text effects with GIMP
Linux Format

Universal layer text effects with GIMP

Posters use them, films and presentations are hard to imagine without them: text effects. Attract attention with Karsten Günther and GIMP.

time-read
8 mins  |
April 2023
Jump to a federated social network
Linux Format

Jump to a federated social network

Nick Peers reveals how you can get up and running with this free, decentralised and non-profit alternative to Twitter.

time-read
9 mins  |
April 2023
Free our SOFTWARE!
Linux Format

Free our SOFTWARE!

Taking anything for granted is dangerous, so Jonni Bidwell and Mike Saunders revisit how the free software movement got started to help free us from proprietary tyranny!

time-read
4 mins  |
April 2023
Master RPI.GPIO
Linux Format

Master RPI.GPIO

Les Pounder goes back to the early days of the Raspberry Pi - and his career with this classic library! -

time-read
5 mins  |
April 2023
Waveshare Zero to Pi3
Linux Format

Waveshare Zero to Pi3

Transform your Pi Zero into a Pi 3, they promised Les Pounder, but it's more like adding on go-faster stripes.

time-read
2 mins  |
April 2023
The Best OPEN SOURCE Software Ever!
Linux Format

The Best OPEN SOURCE Software Ever!

In an attempt to trigger controversy, Michael Reed and Neil Mohr unequivocally state these are the greatest free software apps ever. Probably. We’re just trying to be helpful.

time-read
10+ mins  |
April 2023
Linux-Mandrake 7
Linux Format

Linux-Mandrake 7

Simplicity and a wide range of applications make this a great distribution for all Linux users.

time-read
2 mins  |
April 2023