[Release] DataStax Python Driver 3.27.0 for Apache Cassandra

[Bret McGuire]

Greetings!  Today we've released Python Driver 3.27.0 for Apache Cassandra!

This release introduces a new feature: integrated client-side encryption and decryption of values.  Encryption can be configured with distinct keys for distinct columns.  AES-256 is currently the only implementation but others can easily be added.  Additional details on this feature can be found in the documentation as well as on the relevant ticket.

You can find the documentation for this releases here.  The full changelog for this release can be found here.

A few additional notes of interest with this release.  First, the client-side encryption feature discussed above brings along a dependency on the cryptography module for it's implementation.  This module includes wheels for many platforms so this shouldn't be too intrusive for most users.  If you do need to build cryptography from source you can find details about that process here.

With this release we've also migrated our infrastructure for building wheels for cassandra-driver to cibuildwheel running on Github Actions.  This change should allow us to distribute a wider range of wheels for this release as well as future releases.  As of this writing we don't have wheels for Linux on the i686 platforms, although we are working to address this issue.  See PYTHON-1346 for more detail.

Many thanks to all who educated fellow community members, made feature requests, contributed code, wrote documentation, and reported bugs. We encourage you to get involved too:

Discuss the driver and ask questions:
  - python-driver-user mailing list: https://groups.google.com/a/lists.datastax.com/forum/#!forum/python-driver-user
  - Datastax Community: https://community.datastax.com/
Review and contribute source code and documentation:
  - Driver for Apache Cassandra: https://github.com/datastax/python-driver
  - Report issues on JIRA: https://datastax-oss.atlassian.net/browse/PYTHON

Thanks!

- Bret -

[Madhavan Sridharan]

It's awesome to see Column Encryption coming out. Congrats to the team!

[Federico Fissore]

Hi Bret, and thx for the new release

I see that linux arm64 builds are not available yet: any ETA?

Also, I tried looking up your github actions in the repo to see if I
could add these builds, but I found no `.github` folder: are builds
run in a private repo?

cheers

federico

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[Bret McGuire]

   Hey Frederico, thanks for the question!

   Now that we've switched to Github Actions for wheel builds the Linux/arm64 build requires emulating the arm64 platform and is thus considerably slower than the other builds.  For this release we decided to proceed without those build knowing they'd be coming along shortly afterwards.  The build process for Linux/arm64 wheels has now completed and I've uploaded the built wheels to PyPi so they should be available now.

   As of PYTHON-1278 the process for building wheels lives at datastax/python-driver-wheels.  We used to use TravisCI to build our wheels, but since we were already using TravisCI on the Python driver project itself for smoke test runs we also needed a new repo to manage wheel builds.  Now that we've moved wheel builds to Github Actions we don't necessarily need another repo for wheel builds... so this could change in the future.

   - Bret -

[Federico Fissore]

Awesome thx! My apple colleagues will be happy

cheers

federico