Easy-Cass-Stress Joins the Apache Cassandra Project

• Tue, Aug 19, 2025
• 3-minute read

I’m taking a quick break from my series on Cassandra node density to share some news with the Cassandra community: easy-cass-stress has officially been donated to the Apache Software Foundation and is now part of the Apache Cassandra project ecosystem as cassandra-easy-stress.

Why This Matters

Over the past decade, I’ve worked with countless teams struggling with Cassandra performance testing and benchmarking. The reality is that stress testing distributed systems requires tools that can accurately simulate real-world workloads. Many tools make this difficult by requiring the end user to learn complex configurations and nuance. While consulting at The Last Pickle, I set out to create an easy to use tool that lets people get up and running in just a few minutes

easy-cass-stress was born from this need. I’ve spent years refining it through hundreds of production consulting engagements, where teams needed to quickly validate performance characteristics, test new cluster configurations, and ensure their Cassandra deployments could handle expected load patterns. While the tool has always been open source and available to the community, bringing it under Apache stewardship represents a significant step forward in its development and adoption.

The project has been renamed to be more consistent with the various projects in the Apache Cassandra ecosystem.

Accord Transaction Testing: A Real-World Example

The Apache repository already includes a new TxnCounter workload for testing the new Accord transactions coming in Cassandra 6. This workload provides a practical way to test transaction performance and consistency guarantees – something that’s become increasingly important as teams adopt more complex data consistency requirements. The workload has the ability to run either using LWT (Paxos), or Accord:

cassandra-easy-stress run TxnCounter # for LWT
cassandra-easy-stress run TxnCounter --workload.impl=ACCORD # for Accord

One of the benefits to writing these workloads in code is their flexibility out of the box.

Impact on Easy-Cass-Lab Integration

For teams already using easy-cass-lab in their testing pipelines, I’m updating the integration to point to the new Apache repository. This transition will be seamless – your existing test configurations and automation scripts won’t require changes.

The objective is to maintain the same reliable testing experience while benefiting from the increased visibility and community contributions that come with Apache stewardship.

What This Means for Your Testing Strategy

At a high level, this move accomplishes several important goals:

1. Community Ownership: By being an Apache project, more people can directly contribute. We should see a wider variety of workloads that reflect the needs of a wider variety of organizations.

2. Enterprise Confidence: Many organizations have policies requiring Apache-licensed tooling for production use. This change removes that barrier entirely.

3. Integrated Roadmap: As part of the official Cassandra project, cassandra-easy-stress will evolve alongside Cassandra itself, ensuring testing capabilities keep pace with database features.

4. Reduced Operational Overhead: Teams can standardize on Apache-maintained tools rather than managing dependencies on external projects.

Looking Forward

I’ve seen too many testing environments where inadequate tooling led to performance surprises and operational headaches. This donation ensures that cassandra-easy-stress will continue serving as a reliable foundation for Cassandra performance validation, with the backing and resources of the Apache Software Foundation.

The Cassandra community has always been exceptional at building robust, production-ready tooling. Having cassandra-easy-stress officially join that ecosystem feels like a natural evolution that will benefit everyone working with Cassandra at scale.

For teams currently using the tool, keep doing what you’re doing. For those who haven’t explored cassandra-easy-stress yet, now’s a perfect time to evaluate how it might improve your testing and benchmarking processes.