JanusGraph + Cassandra (Generic questions)

Question

I have a few questions regarding the integration of the two tools. Not technical questions and how to setup( i will have my fun with that later ) but more on the course of the project and the direction, seeing that JanusGraph is still very young.

I am starting a new project and already decided to use Cassandra for storage and using a graph on top sounds very appealing to me.

A couple of things that i would like to know in advance before i take that road.

1. JanusGraph is very young and it picks up from where Titan left about a year or so ago. There is gap there but the fact that is part of the Linux Foundation and all the big players are going to support it sounds promising. Is it safe to assume at this point that JanusGraph is here to stay? Would it be safe to depend on Janus as a startup project? And follow development of course and be up to date as much as possible.

2. Cassandra. Titan/JanusGraph integrates with Cassandra 2.1.9 using the thrift api which will be deprecated eventually in Cassandra 4. I know that work is being done at the moment to make janus work with Cassandra 3 and eventually work with CQL as well. Is it safe to start with existing janus and Cassandra 2.1.9 and deal with the migration later on? Will it be a huge task for a startup to handle?

3. Production ready JanusGraph.(This question relates to any kind of software in it's early stages and whether it's safe for a start up to use). As i understand it, it will take some time for JanusGraph to be production ready and catch up with the rest of the tools it integrates with( although work is being done as we speak:)). Again would it be safe to start using Janus at this point and follow development and finally migrate to a production ready version? What is the overall roadmap for JanusGraph?

My concern in general is whether the combination of the tools is a safe choice for a start up. The whole stack is already new to us and we are excited to try and learn but we will hit a migration period pretty quickly. Is it something that you would do/recommend? Is it a suicide?

Please share your thoughts and keep in mind that it doesn't have to be about the stack i am talking about. It could be any startup company dealing with any kind of software in its early stages.

Cheers

Perigynous

Answer 1

Full disclosure, I'm a developer for JanusGraph on Compose.

1. It's as safe as any other OSS software project with a large amount of backers. Everyone could jump on some new toy tomorrow, but I doubt it. Companies are putting money into it and the development community is very active.

2. There is a CQL backend for Janus that's compatible with the Thrift data model. Migration to CQL should be simple and pretty painless when 0.2.0 is released.

3. I know there are already people using Titan for production applications. With JanusGraph being forked from Titan, I think it's pretty reasonable to start in with JanusGraph from everything I've seen. As far as a roadmap, I'd check out the JanusGraph mailing list (dev/users) and see what's going on and what's being talked about.

Hinson

Answer 2

Disclosure: I am one of the co-founders of the JanusGraph project; I am also seeking out and adding production users to our GitHub repo and website, so I may be slightly biased. :)

Regarding your questions:

1. Is it safe to use?

   The project is young, but it is built on a foundation of Titan, a very popular graph database that's been around since 2012 and has already been running in production. We have contributors from a number of well-known companies, and several companies are building their business-critical applications directly on JanusGraph, e.g.,

   • GRAKN.AI is building their knowledge graph on JanusGraph
   • IBM's Compose.io has built a managed JanusGraph service
   • Uber is already running JanusGraph in production (having previously run Titan)
   • several other companies run JanusGraph as a core part of their production environment
     
     

   We are also starting to identify companies who will provide consulting services around JanusGraph in case someone needs production-level support for their own self-managed deployments.

   So as you can see, there is significant interest in and support for this project.

2. Cassandra upgrade

   @pantalohnes answered this question; I won't repeat it here.

3. Production readiness

   As I linked above (GitHub repo and website), we already have production users of JanusGraph which you can find there. Those are just the companies that are publicly willing to lend their name/logo to the project; I'm sure there are more. Also, Titan has been running in many production environments for several years; JanusGraph is a more up-to-date version of Titan, despite the low version number.

   I am also speaking with other companies who are planning to migrate to JanusGraph soon; look for announcements via the @JanusGraph Twitter handle to learn about more production deployments.

Garwin