Feels like a thread for me
I’ve run more Cassandra than anyone on the planet. Also more FoundationDB. And more Postgres than I can count. Likely 3 orders of magnitude more than you.
1. Any db at that scale requires a team. Thousands of cores is gonna be either paying saas or paying a team and I don’t care what the tech is. You’re gonna fuck up any db on the market letting your app eng run a thousand cores of Postgres or MySQL or couchbase or cockroach or tidb.
2. Cassandra at scale has a demonstrably better cost and availability slo than literally annything else I’ve ever tried to run, as long as you have a competent team. And I had a great team. But we had a great team because we understood that at million core scale it’s a core of the product and you invest in your core. But a good team of a dozen people can run a million cores at 6-8 nines, at lower cost per byte or cost per query than any db-aas you can buy online from any cloud vendor. I know this because we checked, and I’ve been ahead every time.
3. The db isnt fun to run. But it’s getting way better. If you think this is 2009, it’s not. The folks working on it in 2026 know what they’re doing and the last decade has made it measurably safer and easier.
Nothings free, but I’d bet my salary I can run damn near any company on Cassandra cheaper than any of your alternatives. Even all the vendors who keep selling against Cassandra. A competent team on Cassandra is going to beat your vendor product 90% of the time.