Cassandra Cluster Tutorial: Setting up Ansible for our Cassandra Database Cluster to do DevOps tasks

Cassandra Tutorial: Setting up Ansible for our Cassandra Database Cluster for DevOps/DBA tasks

Ansible is a key DevOps/DBA tool for managing backups and rolling upgrades to the Cassandra cluster in AWS/EC2. Ansible uses ssh, so you do not have to install an agent to use it.

This article series focuses on DevOps/DBA tasks with the Cassandra Database. The use of Ansible for DevOps/DBA goes beyond the Cassandra Database. This article helps any DevOps/DBA or Developer that needs to manage groups of instances, boxes, or hosts. These can be on-prem bare-metal, dev boxes, or in the Cloud. You don’t need to be setting up Cassandra to benefit from this article.

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Spark Tutorial: Spark SQL from Java and Python with Cassandra

Analytics with Apache Spark Tutorial Part 2 : Spark SQL

Using Spark SQL from Python and Java

Combining Cassandra and Spark

By Fadi Maalouli and R.H.

Spark, a very powerful tool for real-time analytics, is very popular. In the first part of this series on Spark we introduced Spark. We covered Spark’s history, and explained RDDs (which are used to partition data in the Spark cluster). We also covered the Apache Spark Ecosystem.

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Setting up a Cassandra cluster with SSL for client and cluster transports for DevOps

Setting up client and cluster SSL transport for a Cassandra cluster

This articles is a Cassandra tutorial on Cassandra setup for SSL and CQL clients, as well as installing Cassandra with SSL configured on a series of Linux servers.

Cassandra allows you to secure the client transport (CQL) as well as the cluster transport (storage transport).

SSL/TLS have some overhead. This is especially true in the JVM world which is not as performant for handling SSL/TLS unless you are using Netty/OpenSSl integration.

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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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