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Stargate (Cassandra proxy)

Stargate (stargate.io) is an open-source data API proxy for Cassandra originally developed at DataStax. It sits in front of Cassandra, is token-aware (so it can route queries to the owning replicas without an extra coordinator hop), and auto-generates a GraphQL schema for every keyspace from that keyspace's CQL schema — letting non-CQL-speaking clients consume Cassandra over a higher-level API.

Why pin Stargate to a Cassandra major version

Stargate pulls the Cassandra schema at startup. The 3.11 Stargate can't pull schema from a 4.1 Cassandra node — the behaviour of Cassandra 4.1's MigrationCoordinator (the component that gates schema fetches) diverged from 3.11 in a way Stargate 3.11 couldn't negotiate. Concretely, that means a Stargate instance must be paired with a Cassandra version it can read schema from, which in turn means a cluster mid-upgrade that has a mix of 3.11 and 4.1 Cassandra nodes needs two Stargate fleets running side by side.

See Cassandra MigrationCoordinator.java line range linked in the Yelp post: apache/cassandra@efba69dbe119b5badff494243b7e2c5f560ce5b5/src/java/org/apache/cassandra/schema/MigrationCoordinator.java#L372-L374.

Seen in

  • sources/2026-04-07-yelp-zero-downtime-cassandra-4x-upgrade — canonical wiki Seen-in. Yelp runs two Stargate fleets — 3.11-persistence + 4.1-persistence — simultaneously during the Cassandra 4.x upgrade window, registered under the same service-mesh namespace so clients see a single endpoint. Each Stargate's seed list is kept pointing at a Cassandra node of the matching major version. During the flight stage Yelp deliberately keeps the last 3.11 Cassandra node on 3.11 until the 3.11 Stargate pool is drained — otherwise the 3.11 Stargate pool can't start. Post-upgrade lesson: Stargate 2.x regressed on range and multi-partition queries for Yelp — caught by non-production observability dashboards; Yelp downgraded to Stargate 1.x to mitigate. Yelp also expanded acceptance-test coverage to catch cross-major API deltas between the two Stargate fleets.
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