Design Principes

Statefulset level management#

Cassandra is a stateful application. The first piece of the puzzle is the Node, which is a simple server capable of creating/forming a cluster with other Nodes.

All Cassandra on Kubernetes setup use StatefulSet to create a Cassandra Cluster. Just to quickly recap from the K8s docs:

note

StatefulSet manages the deployment and scaling of a set of Pods, and provide guarantees about their ordering and uniqueness. Like a Deployment, a StatefulSet manages Pods that are based on an identical container spec. Unlike a Deployment, a StatefulSet maintains sticky identities for each of its Pods. These pods are created from the same spec, but are not interchangeable: each has a persistent identifier that is maintained across any rescheduling.

How does this looks from the perspective of Apache Cassandra ?

With StatefulSet we get:

unique Node IDs generated during Pod startup
networking between Nodes with headless services
unique Persistent Volumes for Nodes

The Orange Casskop Operator uses StatefulSet.

Communication with Casssandra's nodes#

CassKop doesn't use nodetool but invokes operations through authenticated JMX/Jolokia call, in this way, the communication result in only HTTP calls.

note

We are currently looking to provide an alternative to use the Management API from Datastax as a sidecar, instead of Jolokia.

Multi site management#

Multi-CassKop goal is to bring the ability to deploy a Cassandra cluster within different regions, each of them running an independant Kubernetes cluster. Multi-Casskop insure that the Cassandra nodes deployed by each local CassKop will be part of the same Cassandra ring by managing a coherent creation of CassandraCluster objects from it's own MultiCasskop custom ressource.

multi casskop design

MultiCassKop starts by iterrating on every contexts passed in parameters then it register the controller. The controller needs to be able to interract with MultiCasskop and CassandraCluster CRD objetcs. In addition the controller needs to watch for MultiCasskop as it will need to react on any changes that occured on thoses objects for the given namespace.