What is Amazon Keyspaces?
Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra) is a serverless, scalable, and managed Cassandra-compatible database service. Keyspaces uses Cassandra Query Language (CQL) and is compatible with existing Cassandra drivers, allowing existing applications to migrate with relatively little effort.
AWS manages the entire underlying infrastructure: provisioning, patching, backups, encryption, and scaling. Applications interact with the data exclusively via CQL. Keyspaces scales automatically with workload, without needing to plan capacity in advance or manually resize clusters.
Core Features
CQL Compatibility: Keyspaces is compatible with CQL 3.x (backward-compatible with 2.x). Common Cassandra drivers (e.g., DataStax Java Driver, Python Driver) can continue to be used with adjusted connection configuration.
Serverless Scaling: On-demand mode for variable workloads, provisioned mode for predictable costs under steady load. No shard or node management as with self-managed Cassandra.
Lightweight Transactions: Compare-and-set operations (IF NOT EXISTS, conditional updates) are fully supported, with no additional performance cost compared to standard writes.
Change Data Capture (CDC): Keyspaces offers CDC streams with a deduplicated, ordered change feed at the table level, accessible via a dedicated API.
Point-in-Time Recovery: Continuous backups enable restoration within a window of up to 35 days, with no maintenance windows.
Typical Use Cases
IoT Data Platforms
IoT applications generate large data volumes from sensors and devices. Keyspaces is well suited for time-series data with high write throughput. Partition keys by device and clustering by timestamp enable efficient queries.
Session Management
Web applications store session data in Keyspaces for fast read and write access with automatic TTL-based expiration. Suitable when persistence and scalability matter more than the extremely low latency of in-memory caches.
Cassandra Migration to AWS
Organizations with existing Cassandra clusters migrate to Keyspaces to reduce cluster management, patching, and capacity planning effort. The migration workflow includes schema export, adaptation for Keyspaces compatibility, data migration via Glue or cqlsh COPY, and dual-write for uninterrupted cutover.
Event Logging and Audit Trails
Applications log events and audit trails to Keyspaces. Partitioning by entity ID enables efficient queries such as “all events for an entity within a time range.” Point-in-time recovery supports compliance requirements for audit logs.
Benefits
- No cluster management: AWS handles hardware, patching, backups, and scaling
- Automatic scaling without over-provisioning or throttling risk
- Full support for lightweight transactions with no performance penalty
- Pay-per-use in on-demand mode for variable workloads
Integration with innFactory
As an AWS reseller, innFactory supports you with Amazon Keyspaces: data modeling (partition key design, clustering, denormalization), migration from self-managed Cassandra or DataStax, performance optimization, and cost analysis for capacity mode decisions.
Typical Use Cases
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Amazon Keyspaces?
Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra) is a serverless, scalable, and managed Cassandra-compatible database service. It uses Cassandra Query Language (CQL) and is compatible with common Cassandra drivers, allowing existing applications to migrate without server provisioning. AWS manages infrastructure, scaling, patching, and backups.
What does Amazon Keyspaces cost?
In on-demand mode, billing is based on read and write request units; in provisioned mode, on reserved read/write capacity units per hour. Additional costs apply for storage and optionally for point-in-time recovery. Exact prices are on the official AWS pricing page, as they vary by region.
How does Keyspaces differ from self-managed Cassandra?
Keyspaces is serverless: no cluster management, no capacity planning, no repairs or node upgrades. Cassandra cluster settings like compaction, caching, or bloom filters also don't apply, since AWS fully manages that layer. In exchange, Keyspaces doesn't support all native Cassandra features.
Which Cassandra features are not supported?
Keyspaces does not support native CREATE INDEX (secondary indexes), materialized views, user-defined functions/aggregates, or triggers. Lightweight transactions (compare-and-set via INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE), however, are fully supported with no performance penalty compared to regular writes. Batch operations are limited to 100 commands (logged batch) or 30 commands (unlogged batch).
How do I migrate from Cassandra to Keyspaces?
For smaller datasets, cqlsh COPY works well; for larger migrations, use AWS Glue. A dual-write pattern enables zero-downtime migrations: write to both systems in parallel, migrate historical data, then switch over reads. Since Keyspaces supports the same CQL drivers, code changes are usually minimal.
Note: All product information on this page has been compiled with care, but is provided without guarantee and may be outdated or incomplete. Cloud services evolve rapidly — features, pricing, SLAs, and availability change frequently. Authoritative and up-to-date information can only be found on the official product page of AWS (official documentation). This page does not represent an offer by AWS.