Cassandra: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition

Chapter 7. Configuring Cassandra

In this chapter, we’ll build our first cluster and look at the available options for configuring Cassandra. Out of the box, Cassandra works with no configuration at all; you can simply download and decompress, and then execute the program to start the server with its default configuration. However, one of the things that makes Cassandra such a powerful technology is its emphasis on configurability and customization. At the same time, the number of options may seem confusing at first.

We will focus on aspects of Cassandra that affect node behavior in a cluster and meta-operations such as partitioning, snitches, and replication. Performance tuning and security are additional configuration topics that get their own treatment in Chapters 12 and 13.

Cassandra Cluster Manager

In order to get practice in building and configuring a cluster, we’ll take advantage of a tool called the Cassandra Cluster Manager or ccm. Built by Sylvain Lebresne and several other contributors, this tool is a set of Python scripts that allow you to run a multi-node cluster on a single machine. This allows you to quickly configure a cluster without having to provision additional hardware.

The tool is available on GitHub. A quick way to get started is to clone the repository using Git. We’ll open a terminal window and navigate to a directory where we want to create our clone and run the following command:

$ git clone https://github.com/pcmanus/ccm.git

Then we can to run the ...