The Apache Cassandra database is the right choice when you need scalability and high availability without compromising performance. That's why it has been used by 40% of the Fortune 100 companies according to its website.

Technically Apache Cassandra is a free and open-source, distributed, wide column store, NoSQL database management system designed to handle large amounts of data across many commodity servers, providing high availability with no single point of failure.Linear scalability and proven fault-tolerance on commodity hardware or cloud infrastructure make it the perfect platform for mission-critical data. Cassandra's support for replicating across multiple datacenters is best-in-class, providing lower latency for your users and the peace of mind of knowing that you can survive regional outages.

This week I went to a webinar "Best Practices of Cassandra in Production" because we are using the similar stack and I would like to find out more about it. The speaker is Adam Zegelin, Co-founder of Instaclutr, a Managed Service Provider for open technologies such as Apache Cassandra, Kafka, Elasticsearch & Redis in the cloud and on-premise.

I learned a lot about Cassandra best practices from architecture, design and operation perspectives, but one thing particularly interesting is the removal of the Java driver support for multi-region load balancing. In my previous practice, I normally try to leverage the load balancing features as much as possible to the bottom of the stack. In the webinar, Adam told the audience that Cassandra Java driver removed the multi-region loading balancing since V4 because the Cassandra team would like to push the load balancing across data centers to the infrastructure layer, which is moving the load balancing feature upper in the stack.

After diving deeper into the Cassandra Java driver document at https://docs.datastax.com/en/developer/java-driver/4.8/manual/core/load_balancing/#default-policy, I have a better understanding of this change.

It's all about the simplicity and the robust infrastructure from simplifying the stack design. Based on the doc, "In previous versions, the driver provided a wide variety of built-in load balancing policies; in addition, they could be nested into each other, yielding an even higher number of choices. In our experience, this has proven to be too complicated: it’s not obvious which policy(ies) to choose for a given use case, and nested policies can sometimes affect each other’s effects in subtle and hard to predict ways."

Cassandra team is taking a more opinionated approach starting from version 4. Since V4, the driver provides a default load balancing policy as the best choice for most cases, while it also provides the custom implementation capability for special use case requirements.

The local only default policy allow application only connect to a single datacenter.

In the previous version, you can have app1 load balancing/failover the request to Cassandra DC2 when Cassandra DC1 loses function. Meanwhile App2 can load balancing/failover the request to Cassandra DC1 when Cassandra DC2 loses function. Sounds great but that adds unnecessary complexity and you barely need it. Normally that means some catastrophic issue in Region1 if highly redundant and highly available Cassandra DC1 loses function. And you most likely should push all client traffic to Region2 as well.

This philosophy behind the Java driver change highly matches our infrastructure experience and our practice. When we designed and implemented the once most widely used data centers for banks and government agencies, we always have the redundant tech stacks in all data centers and leverages APM(application performance management) integration to instruct the infrastructure load balancers to switch the traffic between data centers. In fact we have multi layers of the monitoring to make sure the automatic switch over and low/no false positive.

From theory to practice, and from practice to theory, that's how our industry evolves. Thanks to the open technology providers to enable business build more resilient and performant applications for the more demanding business needs.

More Secure solutions are built on top of the industry proven open technologies, we believe that will bring to our customers the most affordable, effective and secure business solutions. Please contact us to find out how your business will benefit from that too.

Sales teams are by far the most disrupted teams in this pandemic for the majority of businesses. Two industry experts from TOPO, the Gartner company focused on sales marketing research and advisory, and Outreach, a leading sales engagement SaaS service provider told their audience in the panel discussion "What Now? How Leading Teams Thrive in Challenging Times!" this week.

Here is the brief introduction for this event:  

"We’ve invited Dan Gottlieb, an industry expert from TOPO and Victoria Grady, Vice President of Product Marketing at Outreach, to discuss the ways top leaders effectively guide their teams through roadblocks, challenges, and change. In this panel discussion, you will learn about current research about change management, team dynamics, etc, as well as powerful leadership lessons you can apply to your own sales careers. Don't forget to bring your own questions to ask our speakers!"

I attended this insightful panel discussion and learned some of the key takeaways below:

• For most businesses, the entire organization is turning into revenue centric. Revenue leaders need to be more effective to lead human beings to go through this tough period of time while pivoting, with great empathy and compassion.
• Sales organizations need insightful and actionable data more than ever before to successfully pivot their sales conversations and processes, and for the two way dialog between sales leaders and their team.
  Discovery with the customers has never been more important in the whole customer engagement process.
  
• Sales team should promote the culture of coach/mentoring and peer based learning throughout the customer engagement process, with this mindset, sales leaders should be able to realtime look through the pipelines and pivot the engagement to improve the quality individually and organization wide.

Some useful tips and techniques  are:

• How to balance accountability with healthy expectations, realistic daily weekly expectations?
• How to enhance the pipeline creation, deal progression and the predictability of forecast?
• How do we facilitate all of that now virtually?
• How to create advanced messaging and make decisions based on insightful data?
• How do you create a data driven culture without being seen as micro management?
  • how you introduce it, the transparency of where data is from, the way you have conversations about the data are important.
  • It's for the sake of finding ways to continue improving
  • Properly communicate the why, make sure people understand it's meant to help them perform better.

Two best practice examples are worth mentioning:

• The way to turn sales team into insight center of the business by creating sales slack channel as a news room. All sales are encouraged to input their customer research info via a simple template. Not only it creates insightful data for the organization, but also it helps sales to have a better insightful conversation with their customers.
• An SD-WAN managed service provider created a snapshot scorecard for their sales team which include the following four measurement:
  • activity: conversations with customers
  • pipeline: effective conversations to get them into the sales pipeline
  • conversion: deals in stages and how to keep customers engaged throughout the progress
  • quality: structure of the deals and how to make them better

It's very clear now that new normal is not about should the business move their sales process online or not, it is really how and when. Unfortunately the sales marketing tech stack is way too complex and too expensive to a lot of the struggling businesses during pandemic, and the integration is often very hard because of the lack of standard.

That's why we at More Secure Computing focus on building online marketing/sales channels as the foundation for the digital transformation platform. We hope to help entrepreneurs, startups, and SMBs to leap forward with our Affordable, Effective, Secure business solutions via open technologies.

Please contact us to find out how your business can benefit from the innovative open solutions.

Together Let's Stop the Spread of COVID-19

On July 31, 2020, the Canadian government launched COVID-19 Exposure Notification mobile app.