Is there a cost to running Apache Cassandra in containers? How about on Kubernetes? We decided to answer those questions and benchmark K8ssandra on Am

K8ssandra, Apache Cassandra® on Kubernetes

submited by

Style Pass

2021-06-10 16:30:06

Is there a cost to running Apache Cassandra in containers? How about on Kubernetes? We decided to answer those questions and benchmark K8ssandra on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Azure managed Kubernetes services, comparing it to a Cassandra cluster running on AWS EC2 instances. The latter, being a very common setup for enterprises operating Cassandra clusters, serves as our baseline comparing apples to “apples in containers”. While there were many challenges in designing a fair benchmark in a world (the cloud) where apples could very well be oranges, we managed to come up with a solid comparison and results that matched our expectations: running Cassandra in Kubernetes brings flexibility and ease of use without performance penalty.

Note: our initial choice for the baseline was to use i3.2xlarge instances. We discarded them after observing a 30% drop in throughput due to an outdated CPU generation (Intel E5-2686 v4) compared to the r5 instances (Intel Xeon Platinum 8000 series). Cassandra workloads are mostly CPU bound and the core speed made a difference in the throughput benchmarks.