In my previous blog post, I introduced the Dynamo API Service, which is our project to make Apache Cassandra compatible with Amazon DynamoDB by building a middleware. In this blog post, I will share a few interesting challenges we encountered and how we tackled them.

To fulfill my capstone project requirement for the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) Master of Computational Data Science (MCDS) program, I and two of my classmates, Ziyan Zhang and Xiang Yue, collaborated with DataStax to develop a new module in the Stargate system to bring Amazon DynamoDB compatibility to Apache Cassandra. I will introduce our journey in two blog posts. Here in Part 1, I will provide some background on the project and describe the overall design of our system. In Part 2, I will discuss some interesting challenges we encountered and how we solved them.

Our presentation was scheduled for April 27, 2022, and we were asked to reschedule the presentation by Professor Sakr to May 2, 2022, because we had not taken his (and the extended team’s) feedback on the presentation. We have taken the time to reflect on our experience in this final presentation, and here is our reflection when we look back at this experience. We had internally agreed to provide course deliverables to the team two days in advance of the official deadline to get feedback and incorporate it into the deliverable. Still, we did not do that for the final presentation. We had a discussion with Professor Sakr after the first presentation to discuss the mistakes made. The mistakes we made are listed here: