Here’s a roundup of the key discussions and developments from the Cassandra community over the past month. December was a lively month with several new CEPs, active design discussions, and updates to the release process.
1. Cassandra 2025 year in review [Link<https://lists.apache.org/thread/t93z9clvh775f355v1tddxk3994dcgbb>] Great email by Mick summarizing all the events that occurred in Cassandra in 2025. A must-read in my opinion. 2. Cassandra 2025 user survey results [Link<https://lists.apache.org/thread/z02bwzhvjfw038mf2drhnz7pgztkpl7l>] Thanks to Patrick for leading the user survey. The results are out and can be found at the link above. 3. [VOTE] Formalizing of Cassandra release process [Link<https://lists.apache.org/thread/8x2ngj218l2zgmxs83x4gmz6jbrgd4pg>] A vote to formalize the Cassandra release cadence plans and alpha releases was passed and the process has been put in place. The discussion can be found in the link above. 4. [DISCUSS] Adding async-profiler dependency for nodetool commands to Cassandra project [Link<https://lists.apache.org/thread/tt61bglbmd6xszwq3hj8np1ygks83nsj>] This is a good discussion around the pros and cons of adding a dependency on async-profiler to help users profile their Cassandra processes to debug issues. The group is leaning towards adopting it into the project. 5. [DISCUSS] Cassandra Cross Data Center Read/Write with Remote Quorum During Data Center Failure [Link<https://lists.apache.org/thread/dq8f059hc696dvr8n2c7vdjv99ocprb6>] This is a good discussion around adding a new consistency mode in Cassandra to help support cases where a local datacenter is down, but a remote datacenter is still up. Good to read if you’re interested in trade-offs between availability and consistency. 6. [VOTE] CEP-58: Satellite Datacenters [Link<https://lists.apache.org/thread/48c6718fvd6cw66j4ymwm8ft0sdkrdxy>] This CEP proposes a satellite data center topology that achieves multi-region high availability for C* clusters using two full data centers plus one or two small satellite data centers, reducing costs compared to the traditional three-full-DC approach while maintaining transactionally consistent failover with no data loss. It has been voted and passed and will move to implementation. 7. [VOTE] CEP-32: Open Telemetry Tracing Integration [Link<https://lists.apache.org/thread/5f24fsp6yfkct03bdmtqyyhpv158y15p>] This CEP introduces OpenTelemetry tracing support to Cassandra. The vote for this CEP has been passed and it will now move to implementation. 8. [VOTE] CEP-49 Hardware-Accelerated compression [Link<https://lists.apache.org/thread/8gz94247v3q3w5zq8whqdsdrd9s27b7r>] The vote for this performance-focused proposal is open and there is a lot of good discussion in progress. 9. [DISCUSS] Backport CEP-37: Automated Repairs into Cassandra 5.0 [Link<https://lists.apache.org/thread/snss0l76bxmg09vs1wdrcvt37nckh0vw>] This change is in progress and is expected to go out for review soon. There’s lot of excitement in the community to get hold of this feature as part of 5.0.
