CODEWITHSUNDEEP
cassandra
NaveenBabuE
NaveenBabuE

Reputation: 776

DataStax Cassandra seems expensive, is there a best practice configuration to use Apache Cassandra in Production?

DataStax seems expensive. Is there a best practice configuration that is available to use Apache Cassandra in production? I am trying to setup Cassandra on EC2.

Thanks

Upvotes: 2

Views: 1168

Answers (2)

Patrick McFadin
Patrick McFadin

Reputation: 1351

Instead of giving you a commercial for some other product, let me give you some practical advice when choosing to go with OSS vs Commerical licensed products.

You have two things to spend when using any technology. Time or money. Ultimately time is money, but for the sake of this let's say they are different. By your question, you have more time so let's focus on that.

  1. Spend the time to learn the fundamentals. The term black magic is FUD. Some of the world's largest workloads are running on Cassandra. You can do it too.
  2. Seek out peers and learn from those who have been successful. There are organizations that have been running Cassandra in prod for years.
  3. Focus on a single use case/project. Nothing worse than trying to replace all of your infrastructure with a new technology when you are learning. Pick one thing and become proficient. Use that experience for the next projects.

You can get some free training at DataStax Academy. http://academy.datastax.com

Learn from peers by watching talks from the community of awesome users. You can find something in these 135 talks here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLm-EPIkBI3YoiA-02vufoEj4CgYvIQgIk

If you need to ask questions. Stack Overflow, the Cassandra mailing list, and DataStax Academy Slack are all good resources.

Using a commercial product or spending the time is up to you, but don't let anyone try to convince you that it's too hard and you should use something else. We are all here to help if we can.

Upvotes: 11

gutkinde
gutkinde

Reputation: 435

Disclaimer: I'm a ScyllaDB employee.

There are several alternative to operate Cassandra/Scylla like workloads.

  1. Use OpenSource Cassandra, with best practices. Most of them, unfortunately, where created couple of years ago. So you'll need to learn the black magic of tuning JVM and Cassandra loads. https://tobert.github.io/pages/als-cassandra-21-tuning-guide.html There are no "official" AMIs on AWS for recent releases of Cassandra.

  2. Use Scylla OpenSource. It is a drop replacement for Cassandra. Scylla autotunes itself, to minimize the intervention of the operator in the day-to-day operations. Also, Scylla provides opensoure AMIs for EC2 deployment, so, all you need is an AWS account. Scylla is a C++ implementation of Cassandra, which benefits from the great (and costly) resources on AWS. Thus, offer a better ops/$$ ratio. Scylla highly recommends the usage of I3 instances, you'd be using contemporary CPU technology, excellent I/O (NVMe based) and lots of memory at the fraction of the cost of other EC2 instances. You can read more about it here: http://www.scylladb.com/2017/05/10/faster-and-better-what-to-expect-running-scylla-on-aws-i3-instances/

ScyllaDB is committed to provide opensource, optimized AMI versions.

  1. Buy enterprise licenses from DataStax or Scylla.

  2. Hire consultants to help you install a Cassandra setup. Companies like "the last pickle" or Pythian can help you in that regard.

  3. Use DBaaS offerings from the following companies: Scylla:

IBM Compose: https://www.compose.com/databases/scylladb

Joyent Triton:https://www.joyent.com/blog/free-trial-managed-scylladb-beta-on-triton

Scylla and Cassandra Instaclustr: https://www.instaclustr.com/

Hope this helps.

Upvotes: 7

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