[moatra]

KONG definitely looks interesting, and I'd love to know more about it. However, there's definitely not a lot written about it yet.

For example: I've gone searching through the blog posts, github readme, and KONG documentation, but I still have no idea _why_ it needs Cassandra. What does it store in there?

[jkarneges]

Kong uses Cassandra for storing config. This makes it easy to run a Kong cluster. Just add more instances that share the same Cassandra cluster.

[moatra]

Is rate limiting state stored in Cassandra?

One of the main graphics on the KONG docs shows a Caching plugin (http://getkong.org/assets/images/homepage/diagram-right.png), but the list of available plugins doesn't include such an entry. Is that because caching is built in? Is the cache state stored in Cassandra? Or is the plugin yet to be built?

[fosk]

All the data that Kong stores (including rate-limiting data, consumers, etc) is being saved into Cassandra.

nginx has a simple in-memory cache, but it can only be shared across workers on the same instance, so in order to scale Kong horizontally by adding more servers there must be a third-party datastore (in this case Cassandra) that stores and serves the data to the cluster.

Kong supports a simple caching mechanism that's basically the one that nginx supports. We are planning to add a more complex Caching plugin that will store data into Cassandra as well, and will make the cached items available across the cluster.

[sinzone]

Worth mentioning KongDB, to easily provision a cloud Cassandra instance for free: http://kongdb.org