Skip to main content

Introduction

The Orange Cassandra operator is a Kubernetes operator to automate provisioning, management, autoscaling and operations of Apache Cassandra clusters deployed to K8s.

Overview​

The CassKop Cassandra Kubernetes operator makes it easy to run Apache Cassandra on Kubernetes. Apache Cassandra is a popular, free, open-source, distributed wide column store, NoSQL database management system. The operator allows to easily create and manage racks and data centers aware Cassandra clusters.

Some of the high-level capabilities and objectives of Apache Cassandra include, and some of the main features of the Casskop are:

  • Deployment of a C* cluster (rack or AZ aware)
  • Graceful rolling update
  • Graceful C* cluster scaling (with cleanup and decommission prior to Kubernetes scale down)
  • Manage operations on pods through CassKop plugin (cleanup, rebuild, upgradesstable, removenode..)
  • Performing live Cassandra repairs through the use of Cassandra reaper
  • Multi-site management through Multi-Casskop operator
  • Live Backup/Restore of Cassandra's datas

The Cassandra operator is based on the CoreOS operator-sdk tools and APIs.

CassKop creates/configures/manages Cassandra clusters atop Kubernetes and is by default space-scoped which means that :

  • CassKop is able to manage X Cassandra clusters in one Kubernetes namespace.
  • You need X instances of CassKop to manage Y Cassandra clusters in X different namespaces (1 instance of CassKop per namespace).
info

This adds security between namespaces with a better isolation, and less work for each operator.

Presentation​

We have some slides for a CassKop demo

You can also play with CassKop on Katacoda

Motivation​

At Orange we are building some Kubernetes operator, that operate NiFi, Galera and Cassandra clusters (among other types) for our business cases.

There are already some approaches to operating C* on Kubernetes, however, we did not find them appropriate for use in a highly dynamic environment, nor capable of meeting our needs.

Finally, our motivation is to build an open source solution and a community which drives the innovation and features of this operator.