Setting up a Cassandra cluster with cassandra image and cassandra cloud project with Vagrant for DevOps

The cassandra-image project creates CentOS Cassandra Database images for docker, virtualbox/vagrant and AWS/EC2 using best practices for Cassandra OS setup. It is nice to use vagrant and/or docker for local development. At this time it is hard to develop systemd services using Docker so we use Vagrant. Since we do a lot of that, we like to use Vagrant.

Vagrant is important for developers and DevOps not to mention Cassandra DBAs.

The cassandra-image project packages systemd utilities

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Notes on Cassandra OS setup and optimizations for deploying in EC2/AWS

Notes on Cassandra OS setup and optimizations for deploying in EC2/AWS

Disk concerns

These are important concepts for developers and DevOps who are responsible for developing Cassandra based applications and services.

Cassandra writes to four areas

• commit logs
• SSTable
• an index file
• a bloom filter

The compaction process of SSTable data makes heavy use of the disk. LeveledCompactionStrategy may need 10 to 20% overhead. SizeTieredCompactionStrategy worse case is 50% overhead needed to perform compaction. Keep this in mind while sizing disks. If you are doing a high-update use case, LeveledCompactionStrategy is the best solution if you want to limit the total disk size used at any point in time and to optimize reads as the row will be spread across less (up to ten times less) SSTables. LeveledCompactionStrategy requires more IO and processing time for compactions. If in doubt, use LeveledCompactionStrategy.

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