As with many corporate-sponsored open source projects, Stargate becomes most interesting when it gets beyond its roots. DataStax open sourced Stargate “because we got tired of using different databases and different APIs depending on the work that we were trying to get done.” Billed as an “open source API framework for data,” the project aims to offer “a framework that can serve many APIs for a range of workloads.”
And yet Stargate starts with Apache Cassandra, the database upon which DataStax has built its business. For analyst Tony Baer, Stargate “could eventually turn Apache Cassandra into a multi-model database,” and he’s not wrong. But this isn’t what makes Stargate interesting.