Amazon Keyspaces vs Apache HBase

Amazon Keyspaces is a managed database service compatible with Apache Cassandra. It is serverless, requires no infrastructure management, and scales automatically with application demand. The service supports the Cassandra Query Language API, existing application code, Cassandra drivers, and developer tools. Tables can use on-demand read and write capacity or provisioned capacity with optional auto scaling. AWS describes single-digit-millisecond read and write performance, with no limit on table size or row count. Multi-Region deployments offer up to 99.999% availability, and table data is replicated three times across multiple Availability Zones. Keyspaces integrates with CloudWatch for performance metrics and can stream changes to Amazon OpenSearch Service. Keyspaces Streams provides change data capture, while point-in-time recovery can restore table data to any second in the preceding 35 days. Data is encrypted at rest by default, with AWS-owned or customer-managed keys. The free tier lasts for the first three months after creating the first resource, is limited to one per payer account, and includes 30 million write request units, 30 million read request units, and 1 GB of storage.

Apache HBase is a distributed data store for applications that need random, real-time reads and writes with strict consistency. It runs on Hadoop and HDFS, with automatic failover and sharding, and is designed to scale across commodity clusters. The project describes hosting tables with billions of rows and millions of columns. Clients can connect through a Java API or REST and Thrift gateways. Highlighted workloads include time-series and metrics, IoT telemetry, ad tech and personalization, message and audit logs, security analytics, and genomics and research. HBase is free and self-hosted, with Linux and API platforms listed; version 3.0.0 is listed as a release artifact. Operators must configure authentication and authorization because the default configuration does not enable them. Security guidance covers Kerberos, SASL, access control lists, visibility labels, and optional TLS, and recommends keeping services within a trusted network perimeter rather than exposing them to the public internet. Operating a distributed deployment requires systems, software, and networking skills.