A CloudFormation template that describes how to materialize a multi-node Cassandra cluster that is backed by Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes and connect to each other using Elastic Network Interfaces (ENIs) in order to provide private static IPs.

This template is intended to be resilient to failures to nodes so if you take down any of the nodes, the downed nodes will come back up and re-attach the EBS volumes to re-gain their previous state and re-attach the ENI to re-gain the same IP and reconnect back into the cluster. We create an Auto-Scaling-Group per Cassandra node to allow this stateful behavior and leverage and EBS-ENI pair per Cassandra node. This is one of the approaches to building stateful services in the cloud. Another approach which involves leveraging Route 53's DNS Type A Records can be found here.

This is a single AWS region (single C* datacenter) multi-AZ (multiple C* racks) deployment so we make use of the Ec2Snitch. The cluster consists of 3 nodes where each node resides in a single AWS Availability Zone.

• OS optimizations
• Cassandra optimizations
• EBS volume selection (commit log on one volume, data on another volume)
• Node-to-node encryption
• Client-to-node encryption
• Monitoring (pull JMX metrics into CloudWatch Metrics visualized by Grafana)
• Repair (via Cassandra Reaper)

Note: This is a work-in-progress