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Cassandra High Availability

Chapter 1. Cassandra's Approach to High Availability

What does it mean for a data store to be "highly available"? When designing or configuring a system for high availability, architects typically hope to offer some guarantee of uptime even in the presence of failure. Historically, it has been sufficient for the vast majority of systems to be available for less than 100 percent of the time, with some attempting to achieve the "five nines", or 99.999, percent uptime.

The exact definition of high availability depends on the requirements of the application. This concept has gained increasing significance in the context of web applications, real-time systems, and other use cases that cannot afford any downtime. Database systems must not only guarantee system uptime, the ability to fulfill requests, but also ensure that the data itself remains available.

Traditionally, it has been difficult to make databases highly available, especially the relational database systems that have dominated the scene for the last couple of decades. These systems are most often designed to run on a single large machine, making it challenging to scale out to multiple machines.

Let's examine some of the reasons why many popular database systems have difficulty being deployed in high availability configurations, as this will allow us to have a greater understanding of the improvements that Cassandra offers. Exploring these reasons can help us to put aside previous assumptions that simply don't translate to the Cassandra model.

Therefore, in this chapter, we'll cover the following topics:

The atomicity, consistency, isolation and durability (ACID) properties
Monolithic architecture
Master-slave architecture, covering sharding and leader election
Cassandra's approach to achieve high availability

The master-slave architecture

As distributed systems have become more commonplace, the need for higher capacity distributed databases has grown. Many distributed databases still attempt to maintain ACID guarantees (or in some cases only the consistency aspect, which is the most difficult in a distributed environment), leading to the master-slave architecture.

In this approach, there might be many servers handling requests, but only one server can actually perform writes so as to maintain data in a consistent state. This avoids the scenario where the same data can be modified via concurrent mutation requests to different nodes. The following diagram shows the most basic scenario:

However, we still have not solved the availability problem, as a failure of the write master would lead to application downtime. It also means that writes do not scale well, since they are all directed to a single machine.

Sharding

A variation on the master-slave approach that enables higher write volumes is a technique called sharding, in which the data is partitioned into groups of keys, such that one or more masters can own a known set of keys. For example, a database of user profiles can be partitioned by the last name, such that A-M belongs to one cluster and N-Z belongs to another, as follows:

An astute observer will notice that both master-slave and sharding introduce failure points on the master nodes, and in fact the sharding approach introduces multiple points of failure—one for each master! Additionally, the knowledge of where requests for certain keys go rests with the application layer, and adding shards requires manual shuffling of data to accommodate the modified key ranges.

Some systems employ shard managers as a layer of abstraction between the application and the physical shards. This has the effect of removing the requirement that the application must have knowledge of the partition map. However, it does not obviate the need for shuffling data as the cluster grows.

Master failover

A common means of increasing availability in the event of a failure on a master node is to employ a master failover protocol. The particular semantics of the protocol vary among implementations, but the general principle is that a new master is appointed when the previous one fails. Not all failover algorithms are equal; however, in general, this feature increases availability in a master-slave system.

Even a master-slave database that employs leader election suffers from a number of undesirable traits:

Applications must understand the database topology
Data partitions must be carefully planned
Writes are difficult to scale
A failover dramatically increases the complexity of the system in general, and especially so for multisite databases
Adding capacity requires reshuffling data with a potential for downtime

Considering that our objective is a highly available system, and presuming that scalability is a concern, are there other options we need to consider?

Cassandra's architecture

Unlike either monolithic or master-slave designs, Cassandra makes use of an entirely peer-to-peer architecture. All nodes in a Cassandra cluster can accept reads and writes, no matter where the data being written or requested actually belongs in the cluster. Internode communication takes place by means of a gossip protocol, which allows all nodes to quickly receive updates without the need for a master coordinator.

This is a powerful design, as it implies that the system itself is both inherently available and massively scalable. Consider the following diagram:

Note that in contrast to the monolithic and master-slave architectures, there are no special nodes. In fact, all nodes are essentially identical, and as a result Cassandra has no single point of failure—and therefore no need for complex sharding or leader election. But how does Cassandra avoid sharding?

Distributed hash table

Cassandra is able to achieve both availability and scalability using a data structure that allows any node in the system to easily determine the location of a particular key in the cluster. This is accomplished by using a distributed hash table (DHT) design based on the Amazon Dynamo architecture.

As we saw in the previous diagram, Cassandra's topology is arranged in a ring, where each node owns a particular range of data. Keys are assigned to a specific node using a process called consistent hashing, which allows nodes to be added or removed without having to rehash every key based on the new range.

The node that owns a given key is determined by the chosen partitioner. Cassandra ships with several partitioner implementations or developers can define their own by implementing a Java interface.

These topics will be covered in greater detail in the next chapter.

Replication

One of the most important aspects of a distributed data store is the manner in which it handles replication of data across the cluster. If each partition were only stored on a single node, the system would effectively possess many single points of failure, and a failure of any node could result in catastrophic data loss. Such systems must therefore be able to replicate data across multiple nodes, making the occurrence of such loss less likely.

Cassandra has a sophisticated replication system, offering rack and data center awareness. This means it can be configured to place replicas in such a manner so as to maintain availability even during otherwise catastrophic events such as switch failures, network partitions, or data center outages. Cassandra also includes a mechanism that maintains the replication factor during node failures.

Replication across data centers

Perhaps the most unique feature Cassandra provides to achieve high availability is its multiple data center replication system. This system can be easily configured to replicate data across either physical or virtual data centers. This facilitates geographically dispersed data center placement without complex schemes to keep data in sync. It also allows you to create separate data centers for online transactions and heavy analysis workloads, while allowing data written in one data center to be immediately reflected in others.

Chapters 3, Replication, and Chapter 4, Data Centers, will provide a complete discussion of Cassandra's extensive replication features.

Tunable consistency

Closely related to replication is the idea of consistency, the C in ACID that attempts to keep replicas in sync. Cassandra is often referred to as an eventually consistent system, a term that can cause fear and trembling for those who have spent many years relying on the strong consistency characteristics of their favorite relational databases. However, as previously discussed, consistency should be thought of as a continuum, not as an absolute.

With this in mind, Cassandra can be more accurately described as having tunable consistency, where the precise degree of consistency guarantee can be specified on a per-statement level. This gives the application architect ultimate control over the trade-offs between consistency, availability, and performance at the call level—rather than forcing a one-size-fits-all strategy onto every use case.

The CAP theorem

Any discussion of consistency would be incomplete without at least reviewing the CAP theorem. The CAP acronym refers to three desirable properties in a replicated system:

Consistency: This means that the data should appear identical across all nodes in the cluster
Availability: This means that the system should always be available to receive requests
Partition tolerance: This means that the system should continue to function in the event of a partial failure

In 2000, computer scientist Eric Brewer from the University of California, Berkeley, posited that a replicated service can choose only two of the three properties for any given operation.

The CAP theorem has been widely misappropriated to suggest that entire systems must choose only two of the properties, which has led many to characterize databases as either AP or CP. In fact, most systems do not fit cleanly into either category, and Cassandra is no different.

Brewer himself addressed this misguided interpretation in his 2012 article, CAP Twelve Years Later: How the "Rules" Have Changed:

… all three properties are more continuous than binary. Availability is obviously continuous from 0 to 100 percent, but there are also many levels of consistency, and even partitions have nuances, including disagreement within the system about whether a partition exists

In that same article, Brewer also pointed out that the definition of consistency in ACID terms differs from the CAP definition. In ACID, consistency refers to the guarantee that all database rules will be followed (unique constraints, foreign key constraints, and the like). The consistency in CAP, on the other hand, as clarified by Brewer refers only to single-copy consistency, a strict subset of ACID consistency.

Note

When considering the various trade-offs of Cassandra's consistency level options, it's important to keep in mind that the CAP properties exist on a continuum rather than as binary choices.

The bottom line is that it's important to bear this continuum in mind when designing a system based on Cassandra. Refer to Chapter 3, Replication, for additional details on properly tuning Cassandra's consistency level under a variety of circumstances.

What you will learn

Understand the core architecture of Cassandra that enables highly available applications Use replication and tunable consistency levels to balance consistency, availability, and performance Set up multiple data centers to enable failover, load balancing, and geographic distribution Add capacity to your cluster with zero downtime Take advantage of high availability features in the native driver Create data models that scale well and maximize availability Understand how to avoid common antipatterns Keep your system working well even during failure scenarios

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Andreas Baakind Feb 03, 2015

This book is very useful for those who have just started working with Cassandra and wants to avoid the common mistakes that many developers make. It is also a good starting point for those who have a relational database background since it covers the most common pitfalls these developers make. Cassandra may look like a relational database for the very first time, but it acts quite different under the hood. The author has a good way of describing many of the mistakes we make, and how easy it is to do so. He also brings forth the impact on performance from these mistakes.The book also contains simple examples and explanations of how to successfully model for high performance and availability. It uses some of the most known use cases for Cassandra today to illustrate: time series- and geospatial data.Overall I would recommend this book to developer who just started working with Cassandra, and those who are struggling with performance in an already existing cluster. If you do not have any experience with Cassandra beforehand, you will still benefit from reading this book since it will teach you how to do things right and prevent you from making bad decisions later on.

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Amazon Shopper Mar 02, 2015

This is the first Cassandra book I can recommend with no reservations. The author has serious hands-on time with Cassandra and it shows in both the level of detail and clarity in describing everything from the big picture down. Including anti-patterns will save new and some experienced Cassandra users a great deal of pain and frustration. A very good book to go along with your first experiences with Apache Cassandra.

Isidhu Dec 02, 2015

Perfect as an introduction to Cassandra. Helped streamline the process from dev to production.

Fabricio Suarte Apr 24, 2015

Very good book. I found information in that book that I had not found in the internet. The author is very experienced about Cassandra.

giacomo benelli Apr 20, 2015

This is a great book, it gets straight to the point and gives you lots of insights about real use cases. I suggest to approach this book after having read the available documentation, in particular the one available on Datastax web site. Don't get me wrong, a total beginner would still benefit from this book, but it's the kind of read where every sentence counts and fundamental concept are present but not repeated over and over. To get the full implications of many concepts, you probably need to have already heard or dealt with them.Also, even though the title is about high availability, a good amount of time is spent on other related concepts such as performance, application design, example of data center design...If you plan to ever use Cassandra seriously, get this book and you will have a solid foundation to get started.

Cassandra High Availability: Harness the power of Apache Cassandra to build scalable, fault-tolerant, and readily available applications

What do you get with Print?

Cassandra High Availability

Chapter 1. Cassandra's Approach to High Availability

ACID

The monolithic architecture

The master-slave architecture

Sharding

Master failover

Cassandra's solution

Cassandra's architecture

Distributed hash table