Training Summary

This two day training course cover concepts related adminstering and operating Apache Cassandra. In this course we will make a deep dive into concepts related to Cassandra in an administrative setting. After taking this course you should feel comfortable with most concepts related to operating and administering an Apache Cassandra cluster.

In addition to the course outline we will also be participating in exercises to get practical experience in aspects of operating and running a Cassandra cluster. This will include scenarios where we will:

●      Benchmark read and write operations

●      Recognize different types of failure

●      Fix a failed or partially failed cluster

●      Identify potential performance bottlenecks

●      Perform live schema updates

●      Perform move operations

●      Plan and perform cluster-wide operations

●      Monitor compaction, repair, and hinted handoff

Course Outline

During this course we will discuss:

●      The Write Path

○      Log Structured Storage

○      Memtables

○      Flushing

●      The Read Path

○      SSTables

○      Row Merging

○      Cache (Key, Row)

○      Compaction

○      Distributed Deletes

○      Memory Mapped Files

●      Introduction to CAP

●      Partition Tolerance

○      Data partitioners

○      Replication strategies

○      Snitches

○      Hinted Handoff

●      Availability

○      How Cassandra handles failure of one or more nodes

○      What to do in the face of failure

●      Aspects of consistency

○      Consistency

○      Coordinators

○      Read Repair

○      Phi Accrual

○      Hinted Handoff

○      Anti-entropy Service

●      Cassandra and the JVM

●      Monitoring Cassandra

●      How Cassandra works with the physical hardware

○      RAM

○      CPU

○      Disk

○      Network

○      Goals for Sizing

●      The different storage strategies (disk configurations) including

○      Specific concerns for cloud hosting

○      Logical and Physical disk configuration

○      Local disks v.s. network mounted/shared drives

●      Logging

○      Cassandra

○      System

○      GC

●      Backup and Recovery

○      Backup

○      Recovery

●      Security

○      Authentication

○      Authorization

○      Physical Security

●      Overview of the Debian and RedHat packages

●      DataStax OpsCenter

●      Overview of DataStax Enterprise and DataStax Community Editions

●      DSE, or Apache Cassandra + Hadoop

○      Introduction

○      Job and Task Trackers

○      MapReduce

○      Operational Considerations with MapReduce/Hive