rackspace managed cassandra white paper
TRANSCRIPT
Fully Managed, High-performance Cassandra Service | Cover
Fully Managed, High-performance Cassandra ServicePowered by DataStax Enterprise
Fully Managed, High-performance Cassandra Service | Contents
Table of Contents
1. Introducing Managed Cassandra 1
2. Challenges of Managing Cassandra 2
3. Benefits of Managed Cassandra 3
4. Managed Cassandra vs. Unmanaged Hosting 7
5. Common Use Cases 8
6. Conclusion 9
Fully Managed, High-performance Cassandra Service | Page 1
1. Introducing Managed CassandraApache Cassandra™ is an open source, distributed database. Its masterless, shared-nothing
architecture provides operational database applications with near-constant uptime and
simple, linear scalability. Cassandra provides for a flexible data model capable of storing
modern datatypes – structured, semi-structured and unstructured – that run through
today’s web/mobile applications.
However, while Cassandra’s masterless architecture makes it easy to maintain at first,
ensuring optimal performance becomes increasingly complex as you scale, and soon
requires costly expertise that is often difficult and time-consuming to find and retain.
In many cases, developers spend too much time maintaining and troubleshooting the
database layer, which distracts them from writing code.
Managed Cassandra is a production-ready database service — built
on the award-winning DataStax Enterprise (DSE) platform — that frees
developers to focus on building innovative apps. It simplifies database
management by offering pre-configured, fully managed, highly
performant, highly available Cassandra instances, backed by industry-
leading Fanatical Support® 24x7x365.
By combining purpose-built technology with leading expertise, the
Managed Cassandra platform offers:
1. Simplified management
2. Bare-metal performance
3. Highly available, production-ready instances
4. Easy, powerful scalability
5. Data and application portability
Managed Cassandra is ideal for businesses that need the scalability,
flexibility and availability of NoSQL to power innovative web, mobile or internet-of-things
(IoT) apps, but that also need:
• The reliability of a production-ready solution
• Fast time-to-market provided by a turn-key solution
• Freedom to have their developers focus on coding and their IT focus on innovating,
rather than on maintenance and tuning at the database layer.
DSE IS BUILT FOR THE ENTERPRISE WITH THE FOLLOWING FEATURES:
• Production-certified Cassandra with full software lifecycle management
• Comprehensive enterprise security
• Automatic management services for transparent maintenance operations
• Built-in enterprise search capabilities on Cassandra data
• Integrated streaming, real-time, batch analytics, and Hadoop integration
• Workload management for transactional, analytic and search operations
• In-memory option for lightning-fast transactional and analytics workloads
• Visual management and monitoring from any device
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2. Challenges of Managing CassandraIt’s easy for many developers to start building applications with Cassandra. And because all
nodes in a cluster are the same, there are no complex software tiers to manage. This makes
maintenance relatively simple — at first. However, maintaining performance and ensuring
high availability present a range of challenges as your environment grows.
NEXT-GEN APPS PLACE NEW DEMANDS ON DATABASES
Web and mobile apps have new availability and scalability demands that traditional database
technologies aren’t always well suited for. Cassandra’s distributed, always-on architecture is
ideal for many of these use cases. However, as we know from the hundreds of large, innovative
companies that use it to power their modern applications, enterprises require the reliability of a
production-ready solution to ensure that Cassandra is (1) quick to deploy, (2) able to meet their
availability and security requirements, and (3) properly architected to achieve significant scale.
MANAGING CASSANDRA STRAINS EXISTING TECHNICAL RESOURCES
Many businesses that choose Cassandra find that their developers are spending too much
time tuning, patching, monitoring and troubleshooting database performance and rethinking
configuration decisions — as opposed to writing code. This can slow time-to-market, decrease
application quality, and deprive technical contributors of the time they need to pursue new ideas.
EXPERTISE IS SCARCE AND EXPENSIVE
Because Cassandra is a relatively new technology, it’s often both difficult and expensive
to find, hire and retain employees with a proven track record of managing it in large
production environments. This not only puts additional pressure on existing resources, but
can also create a host of other complexities including scaling, maintaining, securing and
optimizing Cassandra beyond the initial configuration requiring specialized expertise.
CONFIGURATION AND TUNING MISSTEPS IMPACT PERFORMANCE
With Cassandra, there are many index design and configuration options that require specific
expertise in order to optimize for performance. Mistakes can result in slower-than-desired
performance or downtime, which detract from Cassandra’s primary value proposition (i.e. a
highly available, scalable database that doesn’t compromise performance).
For instance, Cassandra is written in Java. While more recent versions of Cassandra have
strived to eliminate the need to tune the notoriously difficult Java Virtual Machine (JVM),
some JVM tuning is still required for certain workloads. Failure to do so can result in
increased latency or even failure.
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3. Benefits of Managed CassandraSIMPLIFIED MANAGEMENT AND ACCESS TO EXPERTISE
In order to ease the burden of database management, the Managed Cassandra platform offers:
i. DataStax Enterprise platform fully managed by Cassandra specialists
ii. Simplified deployment, scaling and high availability
iii. Simplified vendor management
I. FULLY MANAGED CASSANDRA SOLUTION
With Managed Cassandra, Rackspace DBAs and customer data engineers (CDEs)
help design, configure, manage, scale, optimize and secure customer Cassandra
environments. In addition, customers have access to a broad range of services, from
schema design to query optimization.
Examples of services included with Managed Cassandra
Deployment
Architecture design
Installation and configuration
Free data migration assistance
Security configuration (e.g., ACL, accounts)
Maintenance
and support
Advanced administration, monitoring and alerting
Managed patching and updates
Upgrades of Cassandra versions
UI support
Escalation support from DataStax
Performance tuning and issue diagnosis
Scaling
Access to scaling guidance and best practices from Rackspace experts
Provisioning of new instances
Resizing and/or growing instances
Optimization
Performance tuning and issue diagnosis
Query optimization
Compactions
Backups
and DR
Geo-synchronized clusters for Disaster Recovery (DR) and Business Continuity
Recommend and plan replication to DR site
Participate in DNS management for failover to DR site
Participate in DR RTO/RPO requirements
Restores from snapshots
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II. SIMPLIFIED DEPLOYMENT AND HIGH AVAILABILITY
The Managed Cassandra platform includes a range of backend and customer-
facing tools that simplify the management of Cassandra, saving customers time and
allowing them to deploy and scale faster.
Design an Optimal Configuration – Customize your configuration to address
your specific data requirements. With multiple reference architecture designs
and flexible networking options, you can optimize your environment for your
specific use case.
Reduced time-to-market – Speed in provisioning and growth planning to help
keep you competitive.
High Availability w/ Automatic Failover (by default) – If a Cassandra node
fails or becomes unreachable, the Java driver automatically and transparently
tries other nodes in the cluster and schedules reconnections to the dead nodes
in the background.
Monitoring, Alerting and Reporting – Monitoring and metrics collection
available via user interface.
Application portability – Support for RackConnect® and AWS Direct Connect
to help minimize the impact of latency while running applications at either
Rackspace or AWS data centers, respectively.
III. SIMPLIFIED VENDOR MANAGEMENT
When businesses juggle multiple providers for infrastructure and Database-as-a-
Service (DBaaS) platform services, it can be difficult to ensure accountability and
enable communication between partners. Managed Cassandra simplifies vendor
management by providing Rackspace infrastructure, certified Cassandra expertise
and DataStax Enterprise, with the production-certified Cassandra platform, all on a
single support contract.
Experts from both companies have single-pane visibility into both the infrastructure
and platform/application layer, which prevents the multi-vendor complexity that often
arises between infrastructure and platform providers. This ensures that Rackspace is
accountable, and that customers get the answers they need in less time.
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HIGH AVAILABILITY AND STABILITY
Managed Cassandra enables you to support always-on applications with a production-
ready platform preconfigured for high availability, backed by world-class guaranteed
uptime SLAs. You get a robust and resilient architecture with monitoring, backups and
Fanatical Support 24x7x365 to preempt and solve problems.
• Decentralized – With Cassandra’s masterless architecture, data is distributed
across the cluster, and every node can service any request. This means there is no
single point of failure, which helps to ensure true continuous availability
• Custom designed architecture – Allows customers to take advantage of a
unique, fully managed platform optimized for Cassandra workloads backed by
Cassandra experts.
• Fault-tolerant – Data is automatically replicated to multiple nodes for fault-
tolerance. Failed nodes can be replaced with no downtime.
• Security – Security features to help secure customers’ applications with enterprise-
grade security options. Manage access with the integrated firewall and access
control list (ACL). Instances terminate both plain text and SSL client traffic.
OPTIMIZED CASSANDRA PERFORMANCE
Managed Cassandra is a single-tenant solution certified for production environments
in Datastax Enterprise and architected specifically to make Cassandra run fast — from
infrastructure to configuration — allowing you to avoid performance issues inherent
in running Cassandra on the multi-tenant public cloud. By increasing transactions-per-
second and enabling fast, predictable database performance, customers can deliver a
better, more consistent experience to end-users.
For instance, Managed Cassandra is built on all-PCIe flash-based infrastructure. This
means that the entire platform utilizes a highly performant I/O subsystem ideally suited
for Cassandra, leading to increased speed and improved consistency — especially for
applications that need to write and re-index very frequently.
EASY, POWERFUL SCALABILITY
With Rackspace handling instance provisioning and resizing, Managed Cassandra offers
the massive scalability of dedicated single-tenant infrastructure without the challenges
and hassle of manually scaling the system yourself.
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Cassandra’s distributed architecture allows you to scale horizontally by simply adding
machines without requiring downtime or service interruptions. Cassandra also
supplies real write/read anywhere capabilities, allowing data to be easily loaded onto
commodity gear across multiple data centers. This means users can size and grow their
clusters while remaining confident that they can adapt to future needs.
In addition, Rackspace specialists are available to help you solve complex scalability
challenges in order to prepare for rapid long-term growth or for massive usage spikes.
DATA AND APPLICATION PORTABILITY
The Managed Cassandra platform is built on open standards to ensure data and
application portability. Because DataStax Enterprise delivers certified Cassandra — built
with an open source Apache license — your data is always portable, with no threat of
database vendor lock-in.
Managed Cassandra allows you to run your application layer anywhere, giving you
additional flexibility when it comes to hosting options. In addition, the platform
supports both RackConnect and AWS Direct Connect, so you can minimize the impact
of latency while running applications at Rackspace or AWS data centers, respectively.
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Unmanaged Managed Cassandra
Deployment Process
Manual deployment
• Manual installation
• Manual configuration of Cassandra, OS, networking, security, monitoring and more
• Manual testing and optimization, with a tradeoff between rapid deployment and future scalability
• Automated deployment
• Secure, pre-optimized Cassandra instances customized for your needs
Performance
• Performance varies on generic commodity servers not optimized for high-I/O database workloads
• Noisy neighbor problems on public cloud create inconsistency
• Must invest in technical resources to tune and optimize data structures, architecture and configurations
• Every aspect of the Managed Cassandra stack has been tuned specifically to make Cassandra run fast
• PCIe flash-based infrastructure
Scaling
• Manual scaling
• On your own for unique challenges and spikes
• Rackspace handles instance provisioning and resizing
• Cassandra engineers on-hand for scaling, unique challenges and spikes
Monitoring
• You allocate resources to monitor availability, performance and security
• Rackspace’s Cassandra experts proactively monitor the network, server and Cassandra for connections, lag, status of nodes, size, number of queries, and more, 24x7x365
Availability
• SLAs vary
• Issues such as network inconsistency can impact automatic failover
Automatic high availability and backups
• Automatic high availability
• Industry-leading SLAs
• Fully redundant infrastructure, from the network all the way up the stack
4. Managed Cassandra vs. Unmanaged Hosting
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5. Common Use CasesThe Managed Cassandra platform is well suited to help companies solve a range of use
cases:
MOBILE, WEB AND IOT APPLICATIONS
Cassandra’s distributed architecture make it a great fit for apps such as mobile and IoT
apps that require near-constant uptime, or that intake data from different geographical
locations across multiple channels.
Managed Cassandra offers a production-ready platform to meet these challenges
while reducing the risks of relying on a less mature technology. And with Rackspace
engineers managing Cassandra, developers are free to focus on building their apps,
improving time to market to keep up with the fast-moving tech landscape.
PERSONALIZED RECOMMENDATION ENGINE
Delivering a consistent, quality customer experience increases customer acquisition and
retention. However, it also requires the consumption and analysis of massive volumes
of dynamic user activity data in real time, to help you give your customers exactly what
they want, every time.
The Managed Cassandra platform is architected and tuned specifically for Cassandra,
with optimizations like PCI-e flash storage. Consistent high performance is part of the
design, helping you make personalized recommendations in real-time and deliver a
consistent customer experience.
MESSAGING
Email, chat, commenting and notification use cases typically have stringent availability
and scalability requirements.
To meet these needs, Managed Cassandra is optimized for continuous availability
and disaster recovery, with strong uptime SLAs – including a 100% Network Uptime
Guarantee. In addition, Rackspace handles instance provisioning and resizing to simplify
scaling, and experts are on hand to help customers plan for their scalability needs.
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FRAUD DETECTION
Cassandra’s distributed architecture and linear scalability make it a good choice for
storing, managing and analyzing large data sets in real-time. Accordingly, storing data
patterns in Cassandra allows you to detect fraudulent activity quickly, accurately, and
without the complexity – and cost – that most relational environments would require.
With Managed Cassandra, real-time monitoring across all channels and data centers
helps you identify suspicious activities before they cause significant compliance issues
or losses in terms of revenue or credibility. In addition, the DataStax Enterprise database
platform includes built-in enterprise-class security to safeguard customer data.
PRODUCT CATALOGS AND PLAYLISTS
Storing collections of user-selected items involves significant performance, scalability
and availability challenges. It also often requires the ability to efficiently manage a
variety of both structured and unstructured data types.
Managed Cassandra’s flexible data model simplifies the creation of catalogs and
playlists, with high performance and seamless scale no matter the data volume.
Multi-data center and cloud replication ensures that end users always have access to
their collection or catalog.
6. ConclusionFor customers seeking a fully managed, production-ready Cassandra solution, Managed
Cassandra is the ideal choice. The DataStax Enterprise database platform offers a highly
available, highly scalable NoSQL solution to power mobile, web and other modern use
cases, while simultaneously enabling you to focus your technical resources on activities
that truly differentiate your business.
To learn more about Managed Cassandra, contact a specialist at 1-877-934-0409
or visit www.rackspace.com/data/managed-nosql/cassandra-hosting.
Fully Managed, High-performance Cassandra Service | Page 10
About RackspaceRackspace (NYSE: RAX)is the #1 managed cloud company. Its technical expertise and Fanatical Support® allow companies to tap the power of the cloud without the pain of hiring experts in dozens of complex technologies. Rackspace is also the leader in hybrid cloud, giving each customer the best fit for its unique needs — whether on single- or multi-tenant servers, or a combination of those platforms. Rackspace is the founder of OpenStack®, the open-source operating system for the cloud. Based in San Antonio, Rackspace serves more than 200,000 business customers from data centers on four continents.
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Modified: 10262015