BetterCloud works on Insights, Security and Management for cloud office platforms like Google Apps and Office 365. In order to support large data sets with no impact to data retrieval and data ingestion performance, we are using Cassandra as the Data Storage engine to serve our Customers across the globe.

1. BetterCloud:
Leveraging
Cassandra
David Hardwick
CTO
Amit Khare
NoSQL Architect

2. BetterCloud
BACKGROUND
Our products and expertise help
customers and partners in all
phases of the transition to the
cloud.
© 2015 BetterCloud, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Venture Backed Startup
Since the company’s founding in 2011, BetterCloud has raised
capital from some of the leading enterprise technology VC firms.
Powering Cloud IT
BetterCloud provides critical insights,
automated management, and intelligent
data security for cloud office platforms. By
leveraging open APIs, BetterCloud securely
connects with your data at its source,
providing maximum control without
requiring any cumbersome setup.

3. BetterCloud
GLOBAL REACH
BetterCloud serves thousands of
organizations worldwide and has
a broader reach than any other
vendor in the space.
50K
organizations
30M
end users
133
countries
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4. BetterCloud
WE ARE HIRING
Devs
Java / C#
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Leads
Java / C#
DevOps

5. Demo

6. BetterCloud Need for Cassandra
© 2015 BetterCloud, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Why Cassandra?
➔ Started with Google App Engine Datastore
➔ Now ~ 90 TB’s of data and growing 100GB per day
➔ Currently, BetterCloud serves 2 billion ops per day (75% reads)
➔ Costs are mounting, looking for a more economic solution
➔ Need linear scalability with no compromise on performance
➔ Need multi-zone, multi-region distribution
➔ Open-Source Apache Cassandra - recommended by AppScale

7. Training for the Team on Apache Cassandra
➔ Use of online videos, documentation, weekly training ~1hr per week per developer
Moving from RDBMS Data Modeling concepts to Cassandra Data Model
➔ Developers adding indexes directly on to columns
➔ Adding where clauses on values that are not indexed
➔ Determining the Primary keys for multi-tenant
BetterCloud Ramping Up
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8. BetterCloud Searching for Effective Data Retrieval
© 2015 BetterCloud, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Indexing table - write the same data to multiple for optimal reads
➔ Denormalized data writes
➔ Back reference by Primary Key
Secondary Indexes
➔ When to use - equality and only one partition
➔ With boolean columns (storing only false) to reduce writes
Ad hoc Querying/Indexing
➔ Need for sorting and filtering on columns, which is a challenge in Cassandra.
➔ Performing proof of concepts on pure open source options
◆ Stratio Cassandra (Lucene)
◆ Stargate TupleJump (Lucene)
◆ In-house custom indexing (Cassandra -> Kafka -> ElasticSearch)

9. Test Driven Development - Integration Tests on Data Services Layer
➔ Continuously brainstorming on Data Model helped us to improve the Data Model immensely
➔ Your model will change, prepare for change with TDD!
Online Training and Documentation
➔ These materials are excellent, read them all...literally
Consulting with Datastax
➔ Helped us to move further and faster using Cassandra, helps to read all the documentation to setup your
questions, then meet with them. Have your datamodel ready.
Multi-Tenant Lessons
➔ Know your metrics - Track reads and writes by tenant and columnfamily!
◆ Add the tenant id to your partition key
Maturity of C# Driver
➔ prepare() and bind() statement emits an object instead of an interface
BetterCloud Challenges, Learnings, & Facts
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10. BetterCloud User Table
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CREATE TABLE user (
tenant_id uuid,
cluster_key text,
user_id uuid,
user_type text,
display_name text,
first_name text,
last_name text,
job_title text,
….
PRIMARY KEY(tenant_id,
cluster_key)
) with compaction = {'class' :
'LeveledCompactionStrategy'};
CREATE INDEX user_user_id on user(user_id);
CREATE INDEX user_is_enabled on user(is_enabled);
CREATE INDEX user_is_external on user(is_external);
CREATE INDEX user_is_globlal_administrator_role ON user
(is_global_administrator_role);
CREATE INDEX user_type_and_distribution_group_flag ON
user (type_and_distribution_group_flag);

11. And that’s all I have to say about that (today).
Questions? Email me:
amit.khare@bettercloud.com | www.linkedin.com/in/adkhare

12. Appendix

13. BetterCloud User Table
© 2015 BetterCloud, Inc. All Rights Reserved
CREATE TABLE group (
tenant_id uuid,
cluster_key text,
group_id uuid,
display_name text,
description text,
is_email_enabled boolean,
email_address text,
email_address_nickname text,
is_dirsync_enabled boolean,
last_dirsync_datetime timestamp,
is_security_enabled boolean,
last_updated_datetime timestamp,
is_external boolean,
total_external_email_contact_count int,
total_external_user_count int,
PRIMARY KEY(tenant_id, cluster_key)
) with compaction = {'class' : 'LeveledCompactionStrategy'};
CREATE INDEX group_group_id on group(group_id);
CREATE INDEX group_is_email_enabled on
group(is_email_enabled);
CREATE INDEX group_is_security_enabled on
group(is_security_enabled);
CREATE INDEX group_is_external on group(is_external);