K8ssandra is a simple to manage, production-ready, distribution of Apache Cassandra and Stargate that is ready for Kubernetes. It is built on a foundation of rock-solid open-source projects covering both the transactional and operational aspects of Cassandra deployments. This project is distributed as a collection of Helm charts. Feel free to fork the repo and contribute. If you're looking to install K8ssandra head over to the Quickstarts.
K8ssandra is composed of a number of sub-charts each representing a component in the K8ssandra stack. The default installation is focused on developer deployments with all of the features enabled and configured for running with a minimal set of resources. Many of these components may be deployed independently in a centralized fashion. Below is a list of the components in the K8ssandra stack with links to the appropriate projects.
K8ssandra packages and deploys Apache Cassandra via the cass-operator project. Each Cassandra container has the Management API for Apache Cassandra (MAAC) and Metrics Collector for Apache Cassandra(MCAC) pre-installed and configured to come up automatically.
Stargate provides a collection of horizontally scalable API endpoints for interacting with Cassandra databases. Developers may leverage REST and GraphQL alongside the traditional CQL interfaces. With Stargate operations teams gain the ability to independently scale coordination (Stargate) and data (Cassandra) layers. In some use-cases, this has resulted in a lower TCO and smaller infrastructure footprint.
Monitoring includes the collection, storage, and visualization of metrics. Along with the previously mentioned MCAC, K8ssandra utilizes Prometheus and Grafana for the storage and visualization of metrics. Installation and management of these pieces is handled by the Kube Prometheus Stack Helm chart.
The Last Pickle Reaper is used to schedule and manage repairs in Cassandra. It provides a web interface to visualize repair progress and manage activity.
Another project from The Last Pickle, Medusa, manages the backup and restore of K8ssandra clusters.
If you are looking to run K8ssandra in your Kubernetes environment check out the Getting Started guide, with follow-up details for developers and site reliability engineers.
We are always looking for contributions to the docs, helm charts, and underlying components. Check out the code contribution guide and docs contribution guide
If you are a developer interested in working with the K8ssandra code, here is a guide that will give you an introduction to:
- Important technologies and learning resources
- Project components
- Project processes and resources
- Getting up and running with a basic IDE environment
- Deploying to a local docker-based cluster environment (kind)
- Understanding the K8ssandra project structure
- Running unit tests
- Troubleshooting tips
For information on the packaged dependencies of K8ssandra and their licenses, check out our open source report.