Chapter 5. Scaling Out

In the old days, a significant increase in system traffic would cause excitement for the sales organization and strike fear in the hearts of the operations team. Fortunately, Cassandra makes the process of scaling out a relatively pain-free affair, so both your sales and operations teams can enjoy the fruits of your success.

This chapter will give you a complete rundown of the processes, tools, and design considerations when adding nodes or data centers to your topology. In this chapter, we'll cover the following topics:

• Choosing the right hardware configuration
• Scaling out versus scaling up
• Adding nodes
• The bootstrapping process
• Adding a data center
• Sizing your cluster correctly

It goes without saying that making proper choices regarding the underlying infrastructure is a key component in achieving good performance and high availability. Conversely, poor choices can lead to a host of issues, and recovery can sometimes be difficult.

Let's begin the chapter...