How to Setup a Cassandra Cluster in 2 Minutes

Jake Luciani, a developer at DataStax, has posted a video online that demonstrates how to download, configure and start a 4-Node Cassandra Cluster in two minutes.

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Cloudant Brings Dynamo Clustering to CouchDB

Brad Anderson from Cloudant, a CouchDB in the cloud provider, has introduced a new clustering mechanism for CouchDB. In their post they describe their solution:

Cloudant makes use of partitions for sharding data.  Picture a ring of partitions that each are responsible for a range of the data.  The partitions, sometimes referred to as virtual nodes or vnodes, are placed on separate physical nodes as the primary means of distribution.

This mechanism is used prominently in other NoSQL databases such as Amazon's Dynamo, Project Voldemort and Cassandra to name a few.

With this feature Cloudant is promoting that the solution is masterless, horizontally scalable and transparent to the application. Fortunately, for those using CouchDB, Cloudant's CEO Alan Hoffman has indicated that this feature will be released via GitHub (see this post, slide 19).

Read more: Dynamo and CouchDB Clusters

Cassandra Cluster in 5-Minutes

Adin Scannell, of GridCentric has posted a recipe for creating a Cassandra Cluster in 5-minutes. Adin provides a very detailed account from installation of required packages to starting up the cluster. One of the very nice features of Cassandra is that all nodes are treated equally. This allows for clusters to be set up rather easily. Adin highlights this point:

Cassandra does not have different classes of nodes, so I had no need to run anything special on the master of the virtual cluster. Cassandra only requires a seed node, so that a freshly started instance can learn about the others. I use the master for this purpose, since we can assume that it's always around.

So if you are looking to create a Cassandra cluster, check it out.

Read more: Howto: Build and scale a Cassandra cluster in five minutes