How Netflix Provisions Optimal Cloud Deployments of Cassandra - Joey Lynch
Channel: The ASF
Date: 2021-10-11

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Replicated How Netflix Provisions Optimal Cloud Deployments of Cassandra - Joey Lynch

A presentation from ApacheCon@Home 2021
https://apachecon.com/acah2021

At Netflix we provision thousands of isolated Apache Cassandra clusters to meet our developer's ever growing requirements and scale. In the past, sizing the compute and storage requirements of a cluster was a somewhat obscure combination of black magic and institutional knowledge, but now we have developed flexible software models to optimally (and reproducibly!) provision our cloud footprints to meet requirements.

In this talk I will cover how the Netflix Apache Cassandra Capacity Model works to transform the extremely uncertain developer inputs such as ""I need around ten thousand queries per second and terabytes of storage"" to concrete cloud footprints that minimize total cost for Netflix. Specifically, I will cover how user requirements such as traffic, data footprint and service tier can be combined with hardware properties such as disk latencies, disk capacity, CPU, and memory capacity to choose the optimal instance type for the job. 

Next, we will cover how the model reacts to various inputs and makes trade-offs between consistency, latency, availability and durability under the constraint of minimizing cost of infrastructure. I will show how the model reacts to a variety of use cases and explain why the model is making certain recommendations.

Finally, I will present the metrics and processes we observe after we provision a cluster to help pinpoint scaling bottlenecks and identify which hardware resource we need to purchase more of. The Capacity Planner isn't always perfect, but understanding the model helps us to scientifically measure and identify bottlenecks even after we are live in production.