---
title: "Zero downtime Upgrade: Yelp’s Cassandra 4.x Upgrade Story"
url: https://daily.dev/posts/zero-downtime-upgrade-yelp-s-cassandra-4-x-upgrade-story-aifuivaeb
source_url: https://engineeringblog.yelp.com/2026/04/zero-downtime-upgrade-yelp-cassandra-upgrade-story.html
type: article
source: "Yelp Engineering"
published: 2026-04-13T16:00:29.283Z
updated: 2026-08-24T06:54:39.146Z
tags: ["kubernetes", "database", "backend", "apache-cassandra"]
reading_time: 12
upvotes: 41
comments: 2
language: en
---

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# Zero downtime Upgrade: Yelp’s Cassandra 4.x Upgrade Story

**[Yelp Engineering](https://daily.dev/sources/yelp)** · 12 min read · 41 upvotes · 2 comments

## Summary

Yelp's Database Reliability Engineering team upgraded over a thousand Cassandra nodes from version 3.11 to 4.1 with zero downtime. The post covers their upgrade strategy including benchmarking (4% p99 latency improvement, 11% throughput gain, up to 58% p99 reduction on key clusters), compatibility challenges with Stargate proxy and Cassandra Source Connector, and a three-stage automated upgrade process (pre-flight, flight, post-flight). Key lessons include a Stargate 2.x regression causing slower range queries (resolved by downgrading to 1.x), schema disagreement on CDC-enabled clusters, and the value of running version-specific components in parallel during the transition. The upgrade was performed in-place via rolling restart on Kubernetes, avoiding the cost and complexity of a separate DC approach.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://engineeringblog.yelp.com/2026/04/zero-downtime-upgrade-yelp-cassandra-upgrade-story.html>

## Community discussion

Top comments from developers on daily.dev.

**@erlanggafauzanrezaganie** · 2 upvotes

> ![image.png](https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--wBnM6eLx--/f_auto/v1776600847/ugc/content_aab0d7eb-7d8e-4c01-9e6c-7ee81e492ab6?_a=BAMAMiWQ0)
>
> looks like its a downtime ...

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---

Tags: [#kubernetes](https://daily.dev/tags/kubernetes), [#database](https://daily.dev/tags/database), [#backend](https://daily.dev/tags/backend), [#apache-cassandra](https://daily.dev/tags/apache-cassandra)

[View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/zero-downtime-upgrade-yelp-s-cassandra-4-x-upgrade-story-aifuivaeb)