Speakers: Renat Khasanshyn, Founder and CEO at Altoros and Cornelia Davis, Senior Technologist at Pivotal Coupling Cassandra with a Platform as a Service may significantly simplify the process of deploying Cassandra and applications that utilize it, reduce the cost of managing Cassandra within the organization, and to allow infrastructure service providers a simple path to offering database as a service to their customers. Attendees will learn why and when use Cassandra atop of Cloud Foundry, the history of Cassandra service within Cloud Foundry, the State of Cassandra integration with Cloud Foundry, how to create and manage Cassandra nodes on Cloud Foundry and what to expect in the next 6 months.

1. Your own Cassandra as a Service
with Cloud Foundry

2. 2
About Altoros
Services
Cloud Foundry implementation services
Hadoop/NoSQL - Benchmarking, Deployment and Customization
Cluster management and optimization in private/hybrid clouds
Customers
• Infrastructure software vendors
• IaaS service providers
• Information-heavy enterprises
Focus
• Platform as a Service (Cloud Foundry implementation services)
• Data science enablement (Hadoop/NoSQL Deployment services)
• Cluster management and optimization in private/hybrid clouds
(RightScale/Chef/Puppet cloud automation template services)
Number of
Engineers/Consultants
250
Headquarters Sunnyvale, CA
Offices Location

3. 3
About Pivotal
Cloud Storage
Virtualization
Data &
Analytics
Platform
Application
Development
Platform
Rapid
Application
Development

4. 4
About Pivotal
Cloud Storage
Virtualization
PIVOTAL
Data &
Analytics
Platform
Application
Development
Platform
Rapid
Application
Development

5. 5
Why Bother? TCO of stand-alone Cassandra
vs Cassandra as a Service with CloudFoundry
Stand-alone CaaS
Provisioning Days or weeks Minutes
Scalability App by app basis Provided by CaaS. Easily
add new nodes
Development
productivity
Server setup, sysops
requests, etc
Use a simple CLI:
$ cf bind service
API None. In-house? Restfull API

6. 6
What is Cloud Foundry?

7. 7
Cloud Foundry Architecture

8. 8
Why BOSH?
• Open source tool chain for release engineering, deployment and
lifecycle management of large scale distributed services
• IaaS provider independency (VMware vSphere, vCloud Director,
Amazon Web Services EC2, or OpenStack)
• Fast PaaS flexible deployment (on top of private, public or hybrid IaaS
configurations) and scalability

9. 9
BOSH architecture and topology overview

10. 10
Cassandra Service Overview
• As many nodes as
you need
• CaaS will be aware
of provisioning
capacity, status,
availability, servers
where Cassandra
runs, etc

11. 11
Demo Screencast
• Initial BOSH deploy of the system, including Cassandra
• Pushing an app that binds to the Cassandra service
• Updating the BOSH manifest to add another node to the Cassandra
cluster

12. 12
Binding to Cassandra Service
OS
DEA
OS
Cassandra
Node
OS
Cassandra
Node
OS
Cassandra
Node
OS
Cassandra
Gateway
OS
Cloud
Controller
OS
Cloud
Controller
OS
NATS
(messaging)
OS
Router
OS
DEA
AppApp

13. 13
BOSH Managed Cassandra Cluster
_node
_node
cassandra_gateway
NATS
10.13.219.151
10.13.219.152
"credentials":{
"host":"10.13.219.152",
"port":9160,
"name":"e55bbca6-a2b5-4c94-a595-
b9aa1ad180b8"}






14. 14
BOSH Managed Cassandra Cluster
_node
_node
cassandra_gateway
NATS
10.13.219.151
10.13.219.152
"credentials":{
"host":"10.13.219.152",
"port":9160,
"name":"e55bbca6-a2b5-4c94-a595-
b9aa1ad180b8"}





_node
10.13.219.153

15. 15
...
properties:
...
cassandra:
seeds: 10.13.219.151
port: 9160
...
...
/var/vcap/packages/cassandra/bin/cassandra
-p $PIDFILE
-Dcassandra.rpc_port=<%=properties.cassandra.port%>
>>$LOG_DIR/cassandra.stdout.log
2>>$LOG_DIR/cassandra.stderr.log
...
...
rpc_address: <%= spec.networks.default.ip %>
rpc_port: <%= properties.cassandra &&
properties.cassandra.port || 9160 %>
...
seed_provider:
- class_name:
org.apache.cassandra.locator.SimpleSeedProvider
parameters:
- seeds: <%=properties.cassandra.seeds%>
deployment-manifest.yml
cassandra_ctl (
cassandra.yaml.erb
jobs
cassandra
packages
blobs
templates

16. 16
Cloud Foundry Cassandra Service Use Case
• SaaS solutions built with xCP for the cloud
• Cassandra
• Metadata lookup
• Which xDB server holds the metadata?
• Configuration
• Shared knowledge for all stateless data servers
• Scale out stateless data servers as CloudFoundry
applications
• Common security across all data services
• Multi-tenant provisioning
• Scale out xCP applications as CloudFoundry
applications

17. 17
CloudFoundry Services
Cloud
Foundry
Apps
CloudFoundry Router
xCP Client
xDB cluster (metadata)
xDB
Server
xDB
Server
xDB
Server
Data
Server
Data
Server
Data
Server
Data
Server
Cassandra cluster
Cass.
Server
Cass.
Server
Cloud Blob Stores
BLOBBLOBBLOB
xCP Application xCP Application xCP Application
Base scale-out architecture

18. 18
History of Cassandra Service for CF
• V1 Services - Present
• Temporary V2 Services without Cassandra (June-Aug 2013)
• V3 Services – Aug-Sept 2013

19. 19
Coming up –Multi-node Cassandra on V2 Cloud Foundry, with V3
Services on AWS

20. 20
Stand-alone Cassandra vs Cassandra as a Service with CF
• Days of installation and administration knowledge and research
capitalized in single and stable service deployments.
• Free up developers from dealing with scalability and high availability
issues
• Guarantee consistent deployments among several environment
(development, staging and production) without misconfiguration risks
that would explode in production.
• Easy to scale, vertically and horizontally

21. 21
Stand-alone Cassandra vs Cassandra as a Service with CF
• Manage different configurations (Services Plans) depending on your
needs.
• Made a bad sizing decision? Just reconfigure your app to use a
bigger/smaller service plan
• Provisioning: from days and weeks to a couple of minutes for a tested
and stable Cassandra

22. 22
Extending CloudFoundry: Buildpacks
• Cloudfoundry provides a convenient way of packaging framework
and/or runtime support for your application with Buildpacks
• Based on Heroku open source buildpacks model
• Can’t find one that fits? You can extend and customize one to fit your
needs.

23. 23
Thank you!
Reach out to our teams for expert help on automated deployment, consulting
and integration of Cloud Foundry and Cassandra:
Altoros Pivotal
renat.k@altoros.com
@renatkhasanshyn
(650) 395-7002
cdavis@gopivotal.com
@cdavisafc
(805) 560-9039