Amazon Keyspaces
Cassandra-compatible database
A serverless wide-column database compatible with Apache Cassandra (CQL), auto scaling, replicated across 3 AZs, with no nodes to manage.
- Cost$$ Medium
- Difficulty●●●●●
- Costs money when idle?A little
- Serverless
- In examsSAA
Think of it asLike a giant spreadsheet where each row has a different number of columns, and someone else adds pages when it fills up.
When to use it
✓ Use it when
Applications already using Cassandra that want to stop operating clusters.
✗ Avoid it when
New designs not tied to Cassandra → DynamoDB; need relational queries, joins → Aurora / RDS.
Common uses
- Moving self-managed Cassandra to AWS
- High-volume IoT data and log writes
- Large-scale transaction history
What does it cost?
- Pricing model: On-demand by read/write units, or provisioned by capacity per hour; plus GB stored and backups.
Related services
SAA-C03 study guide
Keyspaces is covered in these study modules: