# How Yelp Upgraded More Than 1,000 Cassandra Nodes from 3.11 to 4.1 Without Downtime

DevFeed: [How Yelp Upgraded More Than 1,000 Cassandra Nodes from 3.11 to 4.1 Without Downtime](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/zero-downtime-how-yelp-upgraded-1000-cassandra-nodes-no-rollback-18141.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://hungrymindsdev.substack.com/p/zero-downtime-how-yelp-upgraded-1000>)

Author: Alexandre Zajac

Published: 2026-05-11T15:31:13Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [Hungry Minds](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/hungry-minds.md>)

Topics: [Apache Cassandra](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/cassandra.md>), [distributed-systems](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/distributed-systems.md>), [Kubernetes](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/kubernetes.md>), [Latency](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/latency.md>), [Tool](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/tool.md>)

Tags: [cassandra](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/cassandra.md>), [distributed-systems](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/distributed-systems.md>), [kubernetes](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/kubernetes.md>), [latency](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/latency.md>), [migrations](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/migrations.md>), [stargate](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/stargate.md>)

## AI overview

Yelp's Database Reliability Engineering team upgraded more than 1,000 Cassandra nodes from version 3.11 to 4.1 without downtime. The article describes compatibility work, staged automation, proxy routing, gossip management, and CDC changes used during the migration, and reports up to a 58% reduction in p99 latency and an 11% throughput improvement on key clusters.

## Source excerpt

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