Apache Cassandra Installation & Configuration

As you know Apache Cassandra is one of the best NoSQL databases.

Cassandra is highly scalable, highly available and very fast.

Single Cassandra cluster can span accross multiple data centers and it supports hybrid or multi cloud configurations.

In this training, we will start with the installation of CentOS Linux 7.8

We will configure network adapters on our Linux server. We will learn how to disable Security Enhanced Linux and firewalls.

We will configure a dedicated mount point for Apache Cassandra.

We will install OpenJDK.

For cassandra we will create an operating system group and a user.

We will download and extract Apache Cassandra software.

We will configure Cassandra by editing various configuration files : such as : cassandra.yaml, cassandra-rackdc.properties, cassandra-env-sh and jvm.options files.

We will build a 3 node Apache Cassandra cluster in east data center.

We will review the cassandra system.log file to understand the bootstapping process.

We will learn how to properly stop and start Apache Cassandra.

We will enable authentication and authorization to secure our Cassandra cluster.

We will discuss about replication strategy and replication factor settings.

We will create new super user role and disable the default cassandra role.

We will learn about cqlshrc file.

We will create roles for application users and grant them various privileges.

We will review grant permission and revoke permission options.

We will add 3 more nodes to our existing Cassandra cluster to configure it as a multi data center cluster.

We will adjust the replication strategy and replication factor settings for cassandra keyspaces to match with our multi data center configuration.

We will discuss about Cassandra’s nodetool command.

While setting up our cluster, we will learn and follow all the best practises, to make sure our cluster can be maintained in production without any pain.

As a bonus, we will configure password-less SSH between all our Cassandra nodes using ssh keygen and ssh copy id commands.

We will also learn about AWS & EC2s and learn how to run Cassandra clusters on AWS.