Apache Cassandra Chef Cookbook (for OpsWorks)

This is an OpsCode Chef cookbook for Apache Cassandra (DataStax Community Edition).

It uses officially released Debian packages, provides Upstart service script but has no way to tweak Cassandra configuration parameters using Chef node attributes. The reason for that is it was created for CI and development environments. Attributes will be used in the future, doing so for single-server installations won't be difficult.

This has been forked from Michael Klishin's awesome cookbook to include more specific OpsWorks support.

Apache Cassandra Version

This cookbook currently provides

• Cassandra 2.0.0 (DataStax Community Edition) via packages.
• Automatic Seed assignment from the Deployment JSON passed in by OpsWorks.

Supported OS Distributions

Ubuntu 11.04, 11.10, 12.04, 12.10.

Recipes

• I have removed the upstream recipe cassandra-opsworks::tarball and have kept only the installation via cassandra-opsworks::datastax
• You will want to run cassandra-opsworks::opsworks to have your configuration files copied over, however.
• cassandra-opsworks::ephemeral_xfs Reconfigures your instance store volume (only one for now, /dev/xvdb) as XFS. This deletes any data on the volume.

Attributes

• node[:cassandra][:version] (default: a recent patch version): version to provision
• node[:cassandra][:user]: username Cassandra node process will use
• node[:cassandra][:jvm][:xms] (default: 32) and node[:cassandra][:jvm][:xmx] (default: 512) control JVM -Xms and -Xms flag values, in megabytes (no need to add the m suffix)
• node[:cassandra][:installation_dir] (default: /usr/local/cassandra): installation directory
• node[:cassandra][:data_root_dir] (default: /var/lib/cassandra): data directory root
• node[:cassandra][:log_dir] (default: /var/log/cassandra): log directory
• node[:cassandra][:rpc_address] (default: localhost): address to bind the RPC interface
• node[:cassandra][:rpc_address] (default: EC2Snitch): Snitch to use. The default is only meant to be used between availability zones in a single region. See notes in next section if the multi-region snitch is desired.

Helpful Details

• Authentication is enabled by default, you may log in with cqlsh ip_address -u cassandra -p cassandra - it goes without saying that you should change the username and password before putting anything in production :)
• At the same time you're changing the default password you'll want to change the replication factor for the system_auth keyspace. From the cqlsh prompt, run ALTER KEYSPACE system_auth WITH REPLICATION = {'class' : 'SimpleStrategy', 'replication_factor': 3};
• The seed list is currently generated from the list of private IP addresses within the OpsWorks cassandra layer. To use any sort of multi-region function you'll need to use public IP addresses in the seed list (and use the multi-region snitch: EC2MultiRegionSnitch)

Dependencies

OracleJDK 7, OpenJDK 7, OpenJDK 6 or Sun JDK 6.

Copyright & License

Opsworks Fork

Skye Book, 2013.

Released under the Apache 2.0 License.

Upstream

Michael S. Klishin, Travis CI Development Team, 2012.

Released under the Apache 2.0 License.