 Hi, Jeff Rick here. We are on the ground at the Cassandra Summit 2014 conference at the Weston St. Francis in San Francisco. We're going out, we're talking to some of the people getting a vibe for the conference. A lot of excitement here. Again, Billy had a great keynote earlier today and Cassandra seems to be on a pretty good roll. This next guest here is Dave Gardner from Halo. I've been told the Uber of Europe, so that's a pretty active and exciting place to be right now, so welcome. Thank you. So why are you here? I'm here to speak, so I'm here to tell a Halo story about how we used Cassandra to make Halo a success. I organized the London Meetup Group for Cassandra, so I've been involved in the community for about four years now, flying the Cassandra flag from London. So it's an interesting perspective, so I wonder if you can give us a little history about how that has changed over the four years that you've been involved, both in terms of globally, with the summit obviously, but also kind of the adoption there in the UK. Yeah, so I remember the first Meetup we did. We were using Cassandra version 0.6, and back then it was, you know, Cassandra was a very different beast in 0.6. I think Jonathan even mentioned that in the keynote. He kind of gave reference to that. It was tough to use, it was really hard work, and the first Meetup we had about six people turn up in a pub. We've now got over a thousand members in the London Meetup Group alone, and that's just one of the European groups. So, you know, Cassandra adoption has definitely taken off, and that's kind of mirrored the, you know, as Cassandra has kind of come of age and become a much easier to use tool. And at Halo we use it, we now use it for absolutely everything, so we're kind of completely Cassandra native for our technology stack. So I'm kind of curious in terms of the development of the functionality, and how much of it's driven by, you know, just being able to do things that you weren't able to do before, versus really on the demand side from the applications that you're developing that you're trying to do things that no one even tried to do before? For us, the Cassandra story is a lot about kind of operational simplicity and being able to run on many continents. So it would be difficult for us with something like an RDBMS, like MySQL or Postgres, to run it to match where we are in the world. So Halo, we run in North America, we're in Toronto, Boston, Chicago, bunch of other places, New York, we're in Europe, we're in Madrid, Barcelona, Dublin, London, and we're also in Asia. We run in Osaka, Tokyo, we're launching Singapore soon. So we needed technology that would kind of match that global reach, and Cassandra makes that job very, very easy with the active, active replication between the regions. So that's a big part of the story for us. We wouldn't really be able to do that without Cassandra. That's one of the things we like. So you're like the poster child for the poster here, with operations in all these different cities, all these different countries. Pretty remarkable story. So talk about some of the other unique challenges about operating across all those places. I mean, Uber's having challenges here just operating in New York, Las Vegas and San Francisco. You're talking about a whole different host of challenges. And how has Cassandra helped you execute on those? I think the one thing that Cassandra has helped us do is it helps us move quickly because it's a technology now that we don't have to handhold too much. I think Christos from Netflix had a tweet that was in this keynote about how Netflix managed to run thousands of nodes with two DBAs. And it's a similar story for Halo. Cassandra is a technology that just works for us. And that means that it frees up our time to concentrate on building features to win in the different markets that we operate in. Halo's stack is a kind of microservices stack. And we find that's a really good match for Cassandra's use case as well. So we have 130 odd services deployed in production. And the ones that need to store data will do so via Cassandra. So it's really a story about moving fast. We feel that Cassandra is kind of matches our organization. It allows us to get things done. And it's very easy to operate. And we can do it with not many people involved. So are you excited about 2.1? Is this a big release? Yeah, it's huge. I mean, it's funny. So one of my slides for my talk later was about how we were big users of Go, Halo, which is Google's new language. And the driver, the bit of software that connects to Cassandra, it's not great for Go. And then as I was kind of thinking about that for my talk, data stacks announced that they've just released a brand new Go driver. So there's so much good stuff coming out of Cassandra, both out of the community and out of data stacks. It's a really exciting time. So now you've got a chance to tell Billy what do you want from him to work on for next year so when we're here talking, you'll say, thanks, Billy. I told you that was the great thing to do. That's a tough one. That's a tough one. I think analytics is the one area where it would be, I haven't really done a lot of investigation about Spark. So I'm really looking forward to going and seeing some of the talks at the summit about Apache Spark and the kind of integration between that and Cassandra. But it's maybe that analytics side. DSC has got searches kind of sewn up and the basic time series stuff and the entities is really simple. It's just kind of basic analytics. That would be interesting to see if we could get something that absolutely nailed that. Okay, we'll try to get that done for you. So Dave, thanks for stopping by. Again, I'm Jeff Frick. We're on the ground at Cassandra Summit 2014 at the Western St. Francis in San Francisco.