Testing in Production - Mirroring CQL Traffic to a Shadow Cassandra Deployment

Explore the innovative approach to testing complex distributed systems like DataStax Astra in this 36-minute conference talk. Dive into the challenges of deploying new versions and learn about the shadow deployment system developed by DataStax for testing on real-world workloads. Discover the ultra-low-latency proxy that mirrors CQL traffic to a shadow cluster deployed in Kubernetes. Gain insights into the architecture, implementation details, and lessons learned from developing this system. Understand how this method complements traditional testing layers, including unit, integration, distributed, stress, and performance tests, to catch potential bugs that synthetic workloads might miss.