Need to calculate replication lag across multiple region in Cassandra Cluster - cassandra

I am trying to setup a Datastax Cassandra Cluster spanning across two different regions in AWS.The data is getting replicated to nodes in secondary region but I want to calculate the replication lag of the data which is getting replicated from primary to secondary region. Tried to make use of WRITETIME function but seems its recorded when the write happens and then the value gets replicated as it is to other nodes. Is there any other way that we can use to find the replication lag of data being copied from nodes on one region to nodes in another region? The version in use is DSE 6.8.0.

You just need to calculate network latency between two regions. That is the main thing in inter DC communication otherwise if you have similar resources in both DC node latency should be same. For network latency in AWS you can use https://www.cloudping.info/ or https://cloudpingtest.com/aws.

Related

Hazelcast High Availability in case of 3 nodes cluster

We are using Hazelcast IMDG as an in memory grid. The number of nodes in our cluster is three, and we have one sync backup and the cluster is partition aware. In that case, I expect the distributed map will be distributed across 3 nodes (more or less) homogeneously. In case of a node break down, the leadership should be transferred to a healthy node(which has the sync backup for the lost data). If there is a write request to this newly assigned leader node, the same partition should be replicated synchronously to one of the alive nodes. Does it mean that in case of node failure, approximately one third of the distributed map should be replicated and during the replication time, all reads are blocked? Availability is hit if one of three node is down in case of one sync backup till approximately one third of the distribution is restored?
If a node goes down, the cluster will promote the backup partitions to primary.
And the migrations will start to create backups of these new primary partitions.
Please check the Data Partitioning section.
During migrations, read operations are not blocked.
Only write operations are blocked on the partition that is actively migrating.
Since the partitions are migrated one by one, the effect on availability is minimal.

Three node Cassandra cluster all nodes configured different rack in same dc

I am a newbie in Cassandra.
In our production environment three node Cassandra clusters are running and serving production traffic but I have below mentioned doubts:-
1) All nodes are configured in different racks i.e rack 1, rack 2 and rack 3 in the same dc. Is it fine or does this configuration have some drawbacks?
2) We are using rf2 and network topology for all the keyspaces except system tables and these system tables are configured with rf2 and simplestrategy ..is it fine or does this need to be changed? should we increase the replication factor of system_auth? ..please let me know..
3) Now I want to add another node in the same dc, what will be the best procedure to do the same without impacting the live traffic?
Cassandra version is Apache cassandra 3.11.
Thanks in advance..
Ans 1) It seems good to have Cassandra nodes in different racks for availability and fault tolerance .
Ans 2) You must increase RF on system_auth so that you can avoid cqlsh login issue from other nodes.
Ans 3) You can add new node without affecting the live traffic on existing cluster. please follow below procedure.
http://cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest/operating/topo_changes.html
Cassandra is designed as a distributed system. Cassandra’s distributed architecture is specifically tailored for multiple-data center deployment. These features are robust and flexible enough that you can configure the cluster for optimal geographical distribution, for redundancy for fail-over and disaster recovery.
Multiple data center deployments are excellent for global solutions where in some applications are operational in one region and other applications in another region and yet using a single cluster of Cassandra which is working in multiple data centers across regions.
For single region applications, still having multiple data-centers is preferred option because it provides disaster recovery even in case one region goes down.
Ans 1) For a single DC Cassandra cluster , recommendation is to have 4 nodes with RF3. Rack 1 with 2 nodes and Rack 2 with 2 nodes. Remember that nodes in the same rack have faster network than nodes in different racks. With two nodes on the same Rack, queries with LOCAL_QUORUM will be faster as compared to queries on a cluster with all nodes on different racks.
If you are not concerned with the query latency , all nodes in different racks (3 racks) will give better disaster recovery as compared with two RACK deployment. Having said that, it's always recommended to use multi DC deployments for production cluster.
Ans 2) It’s always recommended to increase the replication factor of System_auth keyspace and change the replication class to NetworkTopologyStrategy. Please follow this documentation for more details https://docs.datastax.com/en/security/6.0/security/secSystemKeyspace.html
Ans 3) Yes, You can add a new node to existing cluster with ease without impacting the traffic. Please follow this documentation for more details: https://docs.datastax.com/en/archived/cassandra/3.0/cassandra/operations/opsAddNodeToCluster.html

How cassandra improve performance by adding nodes?

I'm going build apache cassandra 3.11.X cluster with 44 nodes. Each application server will have one cluster node so that application do r/w locally.
I have couple of questions running in my mind kindly answer if possible.
1.How many server Ip's should mention in seednode parameter?
2.How HA works when all the mentioned seed node goes down?
3.What is the dis-advantage to mention all the serverIP's in seednode parameter?
4.How cassandra scales with respect to data other than(Primary key and Tunable consistency). As per my assumption replication factor can improve HA chances but not performances.
then how performance will increase by adding more nodes?
5.Is there any sharding mechanism in Cassandra.
Answers are in order:
It's recommended to point to at least to 2 nodes per DC
Seed/contact node is used only for initial bootstrap - when your program reaches any of listed nodes, it "learns" the topology of whole cluster, and then driver listens for nodes status change, and adjust a list of available hosts. So even if seed node(s) goes down after connection is already established, driver will able to reach other nodes
it's harder to maintain usually - you need to keep a configuration parameters for your driver & list of nodes in sync.
When you have RF > 1, Cassandra may read or write data from/to any replica. Consistency level regulates how many nodes should return answer for read or write operation. When you add the new node, the data is redistributed to new node, and if you have correctly selected partition key, then new node start to receive requests in parallel to old nodes
Partition key is responsible for selection of replica(s) that will hold data associated with it - you can see it as a shard. But you need to be careful with selection of partition key - it's easy to create too big partitions, or partitions that will be "hot" (receiving most of operations in cluster - for example, if you're using the date as partition key, and always writing reading data for today).
P.S. I would recommend to read DataStax Architecture guide - it contains a lot of information about Cassandra as well...

practicallity of having a single node cassandra multisitecluster(3 way)

Is it possible to put a Cassandra cluster with single node DC with 2 remote DC which is also having a single node assuming the replication factor is required to be 3 in this case? The remote cluster is in the same geographical area but not same building for HA. Or is there any hard rules that for high availability and consistency for a need for a local quorum node to achieve that?
Our setup may be smaller compared to big data and usually used to store time series data with approximately 2000/3000 (on different key) sampling per second.
Is there other implications other than read/write may be slow due to the comms delay?
disclaimer: I am new to cassandra.
Turns out I want to deploy a similar setup: 3 nodes on aws, each in its own AZ (But all in the same region). from what I read, this setup is just a single DC, with 3 nodes.
You need to use Ec2Snitch to reduce the latency between your clients and the nodes.
Using RF=3 provides you with the HA that you need, since every node has all the data
Inter-AZ communication should be fairly fast. refer to this: http://highscalability.com/blog/2016/8/1/how-to-setup-a-highly-available-multi-az-cassandra-cluster-o.html
becuase you'll be running in a single DC, local-quorum == quorum. so as long as you'll be writing to QUROUM (which requires 2/3 nodes (AZs) to be up), you'll be strongly consistent and HA.

What are the differences between a node, a cluster and a datacenter in a cassandra nosql database?

I am trying to duplicate data in a cassandra nosql database for a school project using datastax ops center. From what I have read, there is three keywords: cluster, node, and datacenter, and from what I have understand, the data in a node can be duplicated in another node, that exists in another cluster. And all the nodes that contains the same (duplicated) data compose a datacenter. Is that right?
If it is not, what is the difference?
The hierarchy of elements in Cassandra is:
Cluster
Data center(s)
Rack(s)
Server(s)
Node (more accurately, a vnode)
A Cluster is a collection of Data Centers.
A Data Center is a collection of Racks.
A Rack is a collection of Servers.
A Server contains 256 virtual nodes (or vnodes) by default.
A vnode is the data storage layer within a server.
Note: A server is the Cassandra software. A server is installed on a machine, where a machine is either a physical server, an EC2 instance, or similar.
Now to specifically address your questions.
An individual unit of data is called a partition. And yes, partitions are replicated across multiple nodes. Each copy of the partition is called a replica.
In a multi-data center cluster, the replication is per data center. For example, if you have a data center in San Francisco named dc-sf and another in New York named dc-ny then you can control the number of replicas per data center.
As an example, you could set dc-sf to have 3 replicas and dc-ny to have 2 replicas.
Those numbers are called the replication factor. You would specifically say dc-sf has a replication factor of 3, and dc-ny has a replication factor of 2. In simple terms, dc-sf would have 3 copies of the data spread across three vnodes, while dc-sf would have 2 copies of the data spread across two vnodes.
While each server has 256 vnodes by default, Cassandra is smart enough to pick vnodes that exist on different physical servers.
To summarize:
Data is replicated across multiple virtual nodes (each server contains 256 vnodes by default)
Each copy of the data is called a replica
The unit of data is called a partition
Replication is controlled per data center
A node is a single machine that runs Cassandra. A collection of nodes holding similar data are grouped in what is known as a "ring" or cluster.
Sometimes if you have a lot of data, or if you are serving data in different geographical areas, it makes sense to group the nodes of your cluster into different data centers. A good use case of this, is for an e-commerce website, which may have many frequent customers on the east coast and the west coast. That way your customers on the east coast connect to your east coast DC (for faster performance), but ultimately have access to the same dataset (both DCs are in the same cluster) as the west coast customers.
More information on this can be found here: About Apache Cassandra- How does Cassandra work?
And all the nodes that contains the same (duplicated) data compose a datacenter. Is that right?
Close, but not necessarily. The level of data duplication you have is determined by your replication factor, which is set on a per-keyspace basis. For instance, let's say that I have 3 nodes in my single DC, all storing 600GB of product data. My products keyspace definition might look like this:
CREATE KEYSPACE products
WITH replication = {'class': 'NetworkTopologyStrategy', 'MyDC': '3'};
This will ensure that my product data is replicated equally to all 3 nodes. The size of my total dataset is 600GB, duplicated on all 3 nodes.
But let's say that we're rolling-out a new, fairly large product line, and I estimate that we're going to have another 300GB of data coming, which may start pushing the max capacity of our hard drives. If we can't afford to upgrade all of our hard drives right now, I can alter the replication factor like this:
CREATE KEYSPACE products
WITH replication = {'class': 'NetworkTopologyStrategy', 'MyDC': '2'};
This will create 2 copies of all of our data, and store it in our current cluster of 3 nodes. The size of our dataset is now 900GB, but since there are only two copies of it (each node is essentially responsible for 2/3 of the data) our size on-disk is still 600GB. The drawback here, is that (assuming I read and write at a consistency level of ONE) I can only afford to suffer a loss of 1 node. Whereas with 3 nodes and a RF of 3 (again reading and writing at consistency ONE), I could lose 2 nodes and still serve requests.
Edit 20181128
When I make a network request am I making that against the server? or the node? Or I make a request against the server does it then route it and read from the node or something else?
So real quick explanation: server == node
As far as making a request against the nodes in your cluster, that behavior is actually dictated from the driver on the application side. In fact, the driver maintains a copy of the current network topology, as it reads the cluster gossip similar to how the nodes do.
On the application side, you can set a load balancing policy. Specifically, the TokenAwareLoadBalancingPolicy class will examine the partition key of each request, figure out which node(s) has the data, and send the request directly there.
For the other load balancing policies, or for queries where a single partition key cannot be determined, the request will be sent to a single node. This node will act as a "coordinator." This chosen node will handle the routing of requests to the nodes responsible for them, as well as the compilation/returning of any result sets.
Node:
A machine which stores some portion of your entire database. This may included data replicated from another node as well as it's own data. What data it is responsible for is determined by it's token ranges, and the replication strategy of the keyspace holding the data.
Datacenter:
A logical grouping of Nodes which can be separated from another nodes. A common use case is AWS-EAST vs AWS-WEST. The replication NetworkTopologyStrategy is used to specify how many replicas of the entire keyspace should exist in any given datacenter. This is how Cassandra users achieve cross-dc replication. In addition their are Consistency Level policies that only require acknowledgement only within the Datacenter of the coordinator (LOCAL_*)
Cluster
The sum total of all the machines in your database including all datacenters. There is no cross-cluster replication.
As per below documents:-
https://docs.datastax.com/en/archived/cassandra/3.0/cassandra/architecture/archIntro.html
Node
Where you store your data. It is the basic infrastructure component of Cassandra.
Datacenter
A collection of related nodes. A datacenter can be a physical datacenter or virtual datacenter. Different workloads should use separate datacenters, either physical or virtual. Replication is set by datacenter. Using separate datacenters prevents Cassandra transactions from being impacted by other workloads and keeps requests close to each other for lower latency. Depending on the replication factor, data can be written to multiple datacenters. datacenters must never span physical locations.
Cluster
A cluster contains one or more datacenters. It can span physical locations.

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