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Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra)

Amazon Keyspaces is a serverless, Apache Cassandra-compatible wide-column database accessed with CQL and AWS-managed capacity, availability, security, and maintenance.

Explore pricing models, common use cases, infrastructure support, and the AWS services that commonly work with Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra).

Cassandra compatibility and capacity-mode cost

Amazon Keyspaces: Managed Cassandra on AWS

Keyspaces is the managed answer to running Cassandra on AWS: keep CQL and existing drivers, drop ring operations. Capacity mode and read consistency level, not node count, decide what the workload costs.

Official AWS sources reviewed 2026-08-29.

How do I run Apache Cassandra on AWS?

Amazon Keyspaces is a serverless, Apache Cassandra-compatible database service. Applications keep the Cassandra Query Language, existing drivers, and familiar tooling while AWS runs the servers, patching, and scaling instead of a self-managed Cassandra cluster on EC2.

What is Amazon Keyspaces?

What drives Amazon Keyspaces pricing?

On-demand capacity meters reads as read request units and writes as write request units, and the consistency level changes metering because a LOCAL_ONE read bills half of a LOCAL_QUORUM read. Storage, point-in-time recovery, and time-to-live deletes are separate dimensions.

Official Amazon Keyspaces pricing

Which Keyspaces capacity mode should I use?

On-demand suits unpredictable or bursty traffic and charges only for the reads and writes performed. Provisioned suits steady, forecastable throughput. A table's capacity mode can be changed once per day, so start on-demand while measuring and switch after the pattern is known.

Keyspaces read/write capacity modes

Related AWS services for this plan

  • Amazon DynamoDB — Compare DynamoDB for new AWS-native workloads that do not need Cassandra Query Language compatibility.
  • AWS Key Management Service — Use a customer managed KMS key where the table requires encryption control you administer.
  • Amazon CloudWatch — Watch CloudWatch capacity, throttling, and latency metrics before changing a table's capacity mode.
  • Amazon Virtual Private Cloud — Reach Keyspaces through a VPC endpoint when client traffic must stay on private network paths.

Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra) pricing and cost programs

Pricing model: Serverless table usage

On-Demand
Available
Reserved Instances or reserved capacity
Not applicable
Savings Plans
Service-specific
Spot
Not applicable

Billing dimensions: Read and write capacity · Storage · Point-in-time recovery · Data transfer

Programs and modes: On-Demand capacity · Provisioned capacity · Auto scaling

Capacity mode and consistency determine request charges; commitment eligibility is service-specific.

Free Tier: Available — verify current offers

Pricing reviewed 2026-07-25. Reviewed against the linked official AWS pricing page. Recheck regional rates and program terms before purchase.

Official AWS pricing

Official AWS sources reviewed 2026-07-21.

Why implement Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra)?

  • Provides a Cassandra-compatible CQL API without provisioning, patching, repairing, or rebalancing database clusters.
  • Offers on-demand or provisioned capacity, automatic scaling options, Multi-AZ durability, backups, encryption, and AWS identity integration.
  • Supports applications that need predictable wide-column access patterns and elastic scale with fewer database operations.

How to implement Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra)

  1. Define every required query first, then design partition and clustering keys, table settings, time-to-live behavior, and secondary indexes only where supported and justified.
  2. Create the keyspace and table with on-demand or provisioned capacity, point-in-time recovery, encryption, tags, and auto scaling where applicable.
  3. Use a supported Cassandra driver with TLS and SigV4 authentication, configure endpoints and connection behavior, then load-test partitions, capacity, retries, and failure handling.

Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra) best practices

  • Distribute traffic and data evenly across high-cardinality partition keys, bound partition growth, and avoid relational-style scans or filters that do not match the primary key.
  • Use prepared statements, controlled concurrency, idempotent retries with backoff, appropriate consistency, and driver connection settings documented for Keyspaces.
  • Prefer IAM roles and least privilege, use TLS and VPC endpoints where required, enable recovery controls, and alarm on consumed capacity, throttling, errors, and latency.

Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra) use cases and server impact

  • High-scale user and device profiles
  • Time-ordered events by entity
  • Modernizing compatible Cassandra applications without cluster operations

Replaces Cassandra nodes, repair, compaction, patching, and rebalancing operations, but query-first partition design and client tuning remain necessary.

Official implementation resources

Commonly paired AWS services