AWS Cassandra Cluster Tutorial 5 (2025): Modern Cassandra Deployment with CDK, EKS, and Infrastructure as Code

Cassandra Cluster Tutorial 5 (2025) - Modern AWS Cassandra Deployment with CDK, EKS, and Infrastructure as Code

This Cassandra tutorial is designed for developers and DevOps/SRE teams who want to deploy production-ready Cassandra clusters in AWS using modern practices and tools available in 2025.

What’s New in 2025

The landscape of deploying Cassandra on AWS has evolved significantly:

1. AWS CDK v2 has become the standard for infrastructure as code, offering type-safe infrastructure definitions
2. Kubernetes operators like K8ssandra provide production-ready Cassandra deployments
3. AWS Graviton3 processors offer 40% better price-performance for Cassandra workloads
4. Container-based deployments are now the norm, with EKS Anywhere for hybrid deployments
5. Service mesh integration with AWS App Mesh provides advanced traffic management
6. AWS Systems Manager replaces bastion hosts for secure access
7. GitOps workflows with AWS CodeCommit and FluxCD for infrastructure management

Cloudurable provides Cassandra training, Cassandra consulting, Cassandra support and helps setting up Cassandra clusters in AWS.

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Cassandra Tutorial 3, Part 1: Deploy Cassandra with Ansible and SSH Keys - Modern DevOps Practices 2025

Cassandra Tutorial 3, Part 1: Modern Cassandra Deployment with Ansible - 2025 Edition

What’s New in 2025

This updated tutorial reflects the significant changes in DevOps practices since our original 2017 guide:

• Container-First Approach: Cassandra deployments now primarily use containers (Docker/Podman)
• Kubernetes Native: StatefulSets and operators for managing Cassandra clusters
• GitOps Workflows: Using ArgoCD or Flux for declarative cluster management
• Modern Ansible: Ansible 2.16+ with collections and execution environments
• Enhanced Security: Zero-trust networking, service mesh integration, and secrets management
• Cloud Provider Integration: Native support for AWS, GCP, and Azure Kubernetes services
• Observability: Built-in Prometheus metrics and distributed tracing

Overview

In this modernized tutorial, we’ll deploy a production-ready Cassandra cluster using:

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Cassandra Tutorial 3, Part 2: Advanced Ansible Automation and Cloud-Native Operations - 2025 Edition

Cassandra Tutorial 3, Part 2: Advanced Operations and Automation - 2025 Edition

What’s New Since Part 1

Building on Part 1’s foundation, this tutorial covers:

• Multi-Cloud Deployments: Spanning AWS, GCP, and Azure
• Advanced GitOps: Multi-environment promotion workflows
• AI-Powered Operations: Using ML for capacity planning and anomaly detection
• Chaos Engineering: Automated failure testing with Litmus
• FinOps Integration: Cost optimization and resource management
• Zero-Downtime Operations: Rolling upgrades and blue-green deployments

Advanced Ansible Automation

Ansible Execution Environments (2025 Standard)

Create a containerized Ansible environment:

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Cloud DevOps 2025: Packer, Ansible, SSH and AWS/EC2

What’s New in 2025

Key Updates and Changes

• New EC2 Instance Types: M7i, C7i, and R7i families now available with up to 15% better price-performance
• Packer Updates: Version 1.11 with predictable plugin loading and HCP integration
• Ansible Best Practices: Enhanced aws_ec2 plugin with improved security and performance features
• EBS Volume Evolution: GP3 volumes now standard, offering 20% cost savings over GP2
• HashiCorp Updates: Terraform AWS Provider 6.0 with multi-region support
• Security Enhancements: AWS Verified Access for SSH/RDP, enhanced IAM with ECR Policy v2

Deprecated Features and Migration Notes

• GP2 to GP3 Migration: GP2 volumes should be migrated to GP3 for cost savings
• EC2 Dynamic Inventory: Old ec2.py script deprecated in favor of aws_ec2 plugin
• Instance Types: Consider upgrading from M6i to M7i instances for better performance
• Packer AWS Builder: Continue using amazon-ebs builder with updated authentication methods

Cloud DevOps: Using Packer, Ansible/SSH and AWS command line tools to create and DBA manage EC2 Cassandra instances in AWS.

This article is useful for developers and DevOps/DBA staff who want to create AWS AMI images and manage those EC2 instances with Ansible. Although this article is part of a series about setting up the Cassandra Database images and doing DevOps/DBA with Cassandra clusters, the topics we cover apply to AWS DevOps in general - even if you don’t use Cassandra at all.

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AWS Cassandra Cluster Tutorial 5: Setting up Cassandra Cluster in AWS/EC2

Cassandra Cluster Tutorial 5 - Cassandra AWS Cluster with CloudFormation, bastion host, Ansible and the aws-command line

This Cassandra tutorial is useful for developers and DevOps/DBA staff who want to launch a Cassandra cluster in AWS.

The cassandra-image project has been using Vagrant and Ansible to set up a Cassandra Cluster for local testing. Then we used Packer, Ansible and EC2. We used Packer to create AWS images in the last tutorial. In this tutorial, we will use CloudFormation to create a VPC, Subnets, security groups and more to launch a Cassandra cluster in EC2 using the AWS AMI image we created with Packer in the last article. The next two tutorials after this one, will set up Cassandra to work in multiple AZs and multiple regions using custom snitches for Cassandra.

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Part 2 Setting up Ansible and ssh for Cassandra Database Cluster DevOps

Cassandra Cluster Tutorial 3: Part 2 of 2

Setting up Ansible and SSH for our Cassandra Database Cluster for DevOps/DBA Tasks

This tutorial series centers on how DevOps/DBA tasks with the Cassandra Database. As we mentioned before, Ansible and ssh are essential DevOps/DBA tools for common DBA/DevOps tasks whilst working with Cassandra Clusters. Please read part 1 before reading part 2.

In part 1, we set up Ansible for our Cassandra Database Cluster to automate common DevOps/DBA tasks. As part of this setup, we created an ssh key and then set up our instances with this key so we could use ssh, scp, and most importantly ansible. We also created an ansible playbook to install keys on our Cassandra nodes from a bastion host that we set up with Vagrant.

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Setting up Ansible/SSH for Cassandra Database Cluster DevOps Part 1

Cassandra Cluster Tutorial 3: Part 1 of 2

Setting up Ansible/SSH for our Cassandra Database Cluster for DevOps/DBA Tasks

Ansible and ssh are essential DevOps/DBA tools for common DBA/DevOps tasks like managing backups, rolling upgrades to the Cassandra cluster in AWS/EC2, and so much more. An excellent aspect of Ansible is that it uses ssh, so you do not have to install an agent to use Ansible.

This article series centers on how DevOps/DBA tasks with the Cassandra Database. However the use of Ansible for DevOps/DBA transcends its use with the Cassandra Database, so this article is good information for any DevOps/DBA or Developer that needs to manage groups of instances, boxes, hosts whether they be on-prem bare-metal, dev boxes, or in the AWS cloud. You don’t need to be setting up Cassandra to get use of this article.

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Cloud DevOps: Packer, Ansible, SSH and AWS/EC2

Cloud DevOps: Using Packer, Ansible/SSH and AWS command line tools to create and DBA manage EC2 Cassandra instances in AWS.

This article is useful for developers and DevOps/DBA staff who want to create AWS AMI images and manage those EC2 instances with Ansible. Although this article is part of a series about setting up the Cassandra Database images and doing DevOps/DBA with Cassandra clusters, the topics we cover apply to AWS DevOps in general - even if you don’t use Cassandra at all.

Continue reading