As a DataStax Developer Advocate, my job is to help our amazing teams provide you with the best possible experience with Cassandra and our products.
Datastax Astra is built on Apache Cassandra. In addition to great documentation, Astra offers a robust free tier that can run small production workloads, pet projects, or just let you play—all for free, no credit card required. Cassandra can be tricky for hardcore SQL developers, because it uses a different slightly different query language (CQL), but when you get Astra, Stargate is there to let you interact with your data through APIs. Our open source Stargate product provides REST, GraphQL, and schemaless document APIs in addition to native language drivers. If you like them but don’t want to use our products, that’s fine! It’s completely open source and you can implement it on your own system.