Cassandra Dev Project status: 2021-08-02

[Joshua McKenzie <jm...@apache.org>]

Hello Cassandra Project!

As we all know, Cassandra 4.0.0 went GA on July 26th. This is a huge
milestone for the project and the product of the efforts of hundreds of
people; thank you and congratulations to everyone for the hard work and
dedication to the project!

As we used to send out biweekly emails in the run up to 4.0, a few of us
figured we could keep this up to help provide some context and jumping off
points for people who want to get involved in the project or stay up to
date with what's going on.

We have a new release tracking kanban board available here:
https://issues.apache.org/jira/secure/RapidBoard.jspa?rapidView=484. These
things are incredibly configurable; if you have any feedback, think
anything's missing, would like more quick filters, just hit me up on the
ASF slack (@jmckenzie) and I'll add things in.

---------------------------------
Some interesting views:

[Starter Tickets]
For those just getting started with the project, there's a "Starter
Tickets" quick label that corresponds to our Low Hanging Fruit status. Any
of these tickets should be of an appropriate complexity for someone new to
the project to take them on:
https://issues.apache.org/jira/secure/RapidBoard.jspa?rapidView=484&quickFilter=2162&quickFilter=2160

[Needs Reviewers]
We have 5 tickets that are Patch Available and missing reviewers, and 3 In
Progress missing reviewers
https://issues.apache.org/jira/secure/RapidBoard.jspa?rapidView=484&quickFilter=2161

[Committer Attention]
We as a project have agreed that any ticket that is committed should be
worked on by 2 committers, be it 2 reviewers or 1 assignee and 1 reviewer.
There's a column in the kanban board that corresponds with the "Needs
Reviewer" status. We currently have one ticket, CASSANDRA-14160 -
"maxPurgeableTimestamp should traverse tables in order of minTimestamp",
that needs a 2nd committer to review along with Marcus.
https://issues.apache.org/jira/secure/RapidBoard.jspa?rapidView=484&quickFilter=2170

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[CEPs]
For those new to the project, we've adopted a similar process for major
features to some other Apache projects in the form of CEPs, or "Cassandra
Enhancement Proposals". See:
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=95652201

We currently have 6 CEPs under discussion with another 5 in draft. There's
been some good conversation on the mailing list about a few of the CEPs -
please chime in if you have a point of view on the proposed features.
Link to pony mail search of CEP discussions:
https://lists.apache.org/list.html?dev@cassandra.apache.org:lte=1M:CEP

CEP-10 was voted on and received approval from the community to continue
forward.
On CEP-11, there's been some discussion about the architectural proximity
of the memtable and commitlog implementation. More input is always welcome.
https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/rb5e950f882196764744c31bc3c13dfbf0603cb9f8bc2f6cfb976d285%40%3Cdev.cassandra.apache.org%3E

---------------------------------
[Release Cadence]
We had a conversation on the ML earlier this year about what we wanted to
do in terms of support timelines and release cadence. The pony mail link
can be found here:
https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/re15543b55e5d01245ad75f7ec35af97e9895d37c01562eab31963dd4%40%3Cdev.cassandra.apache.org%3E

The conclusions on that thread:

> For the release cadence the agreement is:* one release every year +
> periodic trunk snapshot*



> * 4.0: Fully supported until April 2023 and high severity bugs until April
> 2024 (2 year full, 1 year bugfix)
> * 3.11: Fully supported until April 2022 and high severity bugs until
> April 2023 (1 year full, 1 year bugfix)
> * 3.0: Supported for high severity correctness/performance bugs until
> April 2022 (1 year bugfix)
> * 2.2+2.1: EOL immediately.
> Then going forward we could have this nice pattern when we cut the yearly
> release:
> Y(n-0): Support for 3 years from now (2 full, 1 bugfix)
> Y(n-1): Fully supported for 1 more year and supported for high severity
> correctness/perf bugs 1 year after that (1 full, 1 bugfix)
> Y(n-2): Supported for high severity correctness/bugs for 1 more year (1
> bugfix)


2 things of note: the dates on the site say things are supported until
April 2022 and likely need to be revised to match t+12 for our 4.0 GA date,
and we also list support on the site on 2.2 until April 2022 whereas we
discussed it being EOL on the ML. We'll clarify that on the other
discussion thread.

As always, thanks everyone for everything you do on the project. There is
no Cassandra without this community; thank you!

~Josh