Category: Chronicles from the trenches

This is the last article of the series about “Configuring a Cassandra Cluster in the Cloud” composed of three articles, the first article was about the architecture of the Cassandra Cluster and complete prerequisites, and in the second article we walked through the setup process for installing Cassandra, and finally, in this article, we will be developing all the steps for completing our solution in Azure.  I would like to highlight that these particular series include Azure as the cloud platform, however, the first two articles can be considered agnostic in terms of the mechanisms and approaches used for the main configuration of the Cassandra Cluster.

This article is the second of the series about configuring a Cassandra Cluster in Azure. In the previous one we completed the installation of Cassandra in a new Virtual Machine (VM) in Azure, this VM will become our template for creating new nodes based on it.  In this article we will be covering the next sections:

• Localize key files
• Configuring our Cluster (cluster name, seed nodes)
• Adding more configuration to Cassandra through yaml file
• Configuring RPC (service, interface, and address)
• Deleting data directory

The Apache Cassandra Database is one of the most growing and so scalable NoSQL technology available in the market with an increasing number of companies around the world using it.  Every time that I start a new professional journey toward learning a new technology, It is so important to me count with the tools and a puppet project which give me the possibility to start practicing and including a realistic scenario where I would have the opportunity of consolidating any new knowledge acquired, hence having a Cassandra Cluster with many nodes is must, mainly because horizontal scaling is one of the main strengths of Cassandra.