FeatherCast

This session will re-evaluate Cassandra’s relationship with runtime and build systems, pointing out ways that the existing systems fall down, and identifying avenues for improvement. Over the past few years, a number of platforms have emerged for running user code. Container runtimes like Docker, container orchestrators such as Kubernetes, and metrics collections agents like Prometheus and Spectator have all gained popularity and mind-share. Cassandra functionality such as metrics, bootstrapping, and monitoring integrates with the newer paradigms, but in an ad-hoc and improvised fashion. By taking a purposeful approach to integrating with these new methods of deployment, the Cassandra community can more fully benefit from their advertised strengths. The Cassandra build system based on Ant+Ivy dates to the early 2000’s, and reflects legacy complexity that could be avoided with modern build systems. Cassandra’s system package builds are not much better and often fail to integrate with industry standards such as systemd. Iterating on the existing systems is difficult, but this technical debt slows innovation in our build systems. In this talk, we propose solutions to make building, deploying and monitoring Cassandra easy and low overhead, while taking advantage of cloud advancements wherever possible.