Thrift API seems to be no longer supported with higher versions of Cassandra as well as AWS managed Cassandra. Could someone please let me know what would be the best alternate option to go with?
Our application is built on Spring framework, tightly coupled with Thrift based data models at this point. So, trying to understand if there is any similar API design that could be used. Our plan is to migrate the application to AWS and use managed Cassandra on AWS.
You should absolutely be using CQL. Modern versions of Spring [Boot|Data] use and work very well with the CQL native binary protocol.
Here's a repo we built with Spring Boot that uses Spring Data underneath for access to DataStax Astra DB (managed Serverless Cassandra-as-a-Service). It should be a decent guide for you to see how the repositories and data objects are annotated, built and used.
To add to Aaron's response, enterprises definitely needed to get off Thrift years ago. The drivers based on Thrift API have not been maintained for 5-7 years or more so it is a massive risk to your organisation to still be using it. For example, Nate McCall (who was the Cassandra project Chair until this year) retired the Hector client in 2015 in preference for CQL. Netflix did the same for Astyanax in 2016.
For a bit of background, CQL was introduced in Apache Cassandra 0.8 all the way back to 2011 (CASSANDRA-1703) as a replacement for Thrift. It quickly evolved to CQL2 in Cassandra 1.0.
Cassandra 1.2 added CQL3 in 2012 (CASSANDRA-3761) and support for CQL2 was dropped and replaced by CQL3 in C* 2.0 in 2013 (CASSANDRA-5585). C* 2.2 stopped using Thrift in 2015 (CASSANDRA-8358, CASSANDRA-9319).
5 years after CQL was first introduced, Cassandra 4.0 completely removed Thrift in 2016 (CASSANDRA-11115). This should convince any enterprise to migrate to CQL. There hasn't been support for the Thrift API for at least 6 years and this alone should motivate organisations to get off it.
CQL has been around for 10 years now so you shouldn't have any concerns with its maturity. Cheers!
