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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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 an essential DevOps/DBA tool for managing backups and rolling upgrades to the Cassandra cluster in AWS/EC2. 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 Cloud. You don’t need to be setting up Cassandra to get use of this article.

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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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