uzokis/fancy-cassandra-cluster

Vagrant & puppet combo to spawn a cassandra development cluster

What is this repository for?

• This repository contains a vagrantfile & puppet manifests to quickly setup a cassandra cluster for development or experimentation.

• It's been tested with
  • Cassandra 3.0.8
  • CentOS 7
  • Vagrant 1.7.4
  • Puppet 3.8.7 (masterless)
  • VirtualBox 5.0.26
  • Windows 8 (as host)

• Without changes this project will spawn a single guest running 3 cassandra nodes in 1 cluster, which should be reachable from the host. The cluster contains no data.

How do I get set up?

1. Install Vagrant & VirtualBox on your host system.
2. Clone this repository to a local directory.
3. Run vagrant up in the root folder. Vagrant & puppet will now automatically provision the guest system and when the process is finished you'll have your cassandra cluster up & running.
4. Use ssh/putty to logon via the forwarded port to the guest (credentials are vagrant/vagrant), alternatively you can use vagrant ssh if your host has an ssh client on the path.
5. Cassandra authentication is disabled so you can logon with any credentials to the system keyspace from the host (eg. with DBeaver), these are the default interfaces which should be available:
   • Node1: 10.99.88.11:9042
   • Node2: 10.99.88.12:9042
   • Node3: 10.99.88.13:9042

What to configure where?

If you're not happy with the standard behavior feel free to adapt the scripts, here are some guidelines:

• Change guest properties such as available memory, network interfaces,... in Vagrantfile
• puppet/manifests/default.pp is the starting point for the puppet agent, it installs/prepares prerequisites for the cassandra installation (java, downloads the cassandra binary, defines 3 nodes) and defines configuration used in the cassandra_node module (ip, ports)
• puppet/modules/cassandra/manifests/cassandra_node.pp actually installs a node and enables & starts it as a service (using systemd)
• puppet/manifests/cassandra/templates/ this folder contains generic cassandra config file templates & a systemd template

Useful commands

Cassandra & CentOS (in the guest)

• systemctl stop cassandra-node1 - Stop a node
• systemctl start cassandra-node2 - Start a node
• systemctl status cassandra-node2 - Check the process status of a node
• /opt/cassandra/node1/bin/nodetool status - Check the status of the cluster

Vagrant (in the host)

• vagrant up - Bring the guest system up, provision if non-existent
• vagrant provision - run the provisioning (will trigger a puppet run)
• vagrant reload - restart the guest

On the TODO list

• Spawn a hardened, production-ready cluster: http://thelastpickle.com/blog/2015/09/30/hardening-cassandra-step-by-step-part-1-server-to-server.html
• Create some alternative Vagrantfiles & puppet manifests to spawn multi-machine clusters
• Test more versions and rename the templates to version specific config files

Who do I talk to?

• You can find me on twitter: @vanfraeyenhove