Deploy & Setup a Cassandra 3.x Cluster on EC2

Cassandra is a Rock solid AP NoSQL database. For this blog post, I will share a simple recipe to deploy a Cassandra cluster on AWS/EC2.

There is the DataStax AMI or DSE you should consider for production workloads.  This recipe I'm sharing is for Amazon Linux(CentOS based) but you can do for Ubuntu or even in Docker if you want to.

Keep in mind this is for Development / Experimentation purpose. I'm not covering proper tunning for your workload, Compaction Strategy and Keyspace design here and you also should be doing this under multiples ASG 1 per AZ ideally. So Let's get started.

Cassandra 3.x Cluster on AWS EC2

Open Security Groups Ports

7000
9160
9042
7199

Download and install Java JDK 8

# Remove java 7
sudo yum remove -y java

# Install basic packages
sudo yum install -y git

# Download and install java 8
wget --no-cookies --no-check-certificate --header "Cookie: gpw_e24=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.oracle.com%2F; oraclelicense=accept-securebackup-cookie" "http://download.oracle.com/otn-pub/java/jdk/8u171-b11/512cd62ec5174c3487ac17c61aaa89e8/jdk-8u171-linux-x64.tar.gz"
tar -xzvf jdk-8u171-linux-x64.tar.gz
rm -rf jdk-8u171-linux-x64.tar.gz

# Configure JAVA_HOME
sudo vim ~/.bashrc

ENV Vars $ sudo vim ~/.bashrc

alias cls='clear'

export JAVA_HOME=~/jdk1.8.0_171
export JRE_HOME=$JAVA_HOME/jre
export PATH=$PATH:$JAVA_HOME/bin:$JAVA_HOME/jre/bin

source ~/.bashrc
java -version

Install Cassandra 3.x

wget https://archive.apache.org/dist/cassandra/3.11.2/apache-cassandra-3.11.2-bin.tar.gz
tar -xzvf apache-cassandra-3.11.2-bin.tar.gz
rm -rf apache-cassandra-3.11.2-bin.tar.gz

Configure the Clsuter

# your_server_ip - copy the IP
hostname -i
vim ~/apache-cassandra-3.11.2/conf/cassandra.yaml

cluster_name: 'Test Cluster'
listen_address: your_server_ip
rpc_address: your_server_ip
seed_provider:
  - class_name: org.apache.cassandra.locator.SimpleSeedProvider
    parameters:
         - seeds: "ip1,ip2,...ipN"
endpoint_snitch: GossipingPropertyFileSnitch

Startup Cassandra, Create Keyspace and Test data replication with CQLSH

apache-cassandra-3.11.2/bin/cassandra &
apache-cassandra-3.11.2/bin/cqlsh $(hostname -i)

CREATE KEYSPACE CLUSTER_TEST WITH REPLICATION = { 'class' : 'SimpleStrategy', 'replication_factor' : 3 }; 
USE CLUSTER_TEST;
CREATE TABLE TEST ( key text PRIMARY KEY, value text);
INSERT INTO TEST (key,value) VALUES ('1', 'works');
SELECT * from CLUSTER_TEST.TEST;

apache-cassandra-3.11.2/bin/cqlsh $(hostname -i)
SELECT * from CLUSTER_TEST.TEST;

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Cheers,
Diego Pacheco