Editor’s note: This story originally ran on July 27, 2021, the day that Apache Cassandra 4.0 was released.

Today is a big day for those of us in the Apache Cassandra community. After a long uphill climb, Apache Cassandra 4.0 has finally shipped. I say finally because it has at times seemed like an elusive goal. I’ve been involved in the Cassandra project for almost 10 years now and I have seen a lot of ups and downs. So I feel this day marks an important milestone that isn’t just a version number. This is an important milestone in the lifecycle of a database project that has come into its own as an important database used around the world. The 4.0 release is not only incredibly stable in the history of Cassandra, but it’s also quite possibly the most stable release of any database. Now it’s ready to launch into the next 10 years of cloud-native data; it has the computer science and hard-won history to make a huge impact. Today’s milestone is the end of the beginning.