Amazon Web Services Inc. said today its Amazon Keyspaces for Apache Cassandra managed service is now generally available.

The service was announced in preview at AWS re:Invent 2019 when it was known as Amazon Managed Cassandra Service. It’s essentially a cloud database that’s compatible with the existing open-source Cassandra database. The service notably supports the same application code, developer tools and Apache 2.0 licensed drivers used by customers running Cassandra workloads, Amazon said.

Apache Cassandra is an open-source distributed database system that’s designed for storing and managing large amounts of data across commodity servers. Originally created by Facebook Inc., Cassandra provides extremely high availability with no single point of failure, and it’s especially useful for applications that track and monitor user activity, social media analytics and messaging applications.

Amazon said the main benefit of the Keyspaces service is it enables customers to migrate their on-premises Cassandra workloads to its cloud, where they’re much easier to maintain. And because it’s a serverless offering, it means there are no servers to manage, and there’s no need to provision or configure large clusters.

“Many customers using AWS have asked for help running, scaling, and managing their Cassandra database deployments because managing large Cassandra clusters on-premises with hundreds of terabytes of data and millions of reads and writes per second is difficult and complex,” AWS said. “Cassandra requires specialized expertise to set up, configure, and maintain the underlying infrastructure, and necessitates a deep understanding of the entire application stack, including the Apache Cassandra open-source software.”

Amazon said customers with existing Cassandra workloads that run on-premises or on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud can migrate those tables to Amazon Keyspaces using services such as Amazon EMR, or open-source tools such as Cassandra Query Language Shell.

The service is now available in 18 regions, including US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), US West (N. California), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), Europe (London), Europe (Paris), Europe (Stockholm), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Canada (Central), Middle East (Bahrain) and South America (Sao Paulo).

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