How Netflix Manages Version Upgrades of Cassandra at Scale
Channel: The ASF
Date: 21/10/2020

How Netflix Manages Version Upgrades of Cassandra at Scale
Sumanth Pasupuleti

A presentation from ApacheCon @Home 2020
https://apachecon.com/acah2020/

We at Netflix have about 70% of our fleet on Apache Cassandra 2.1, while the remaining 30% is on 3.0. We have embarked on a multi quarter task of upgrading our 2.1 fleet to 3.0, as part of which we are doing several kinds of verification overarching both correctness and performance. It is a known issue that cross version streaming is not supported in Cassandra. To work around this, we've also developed a version agnostic upgrade mechanism using our desire based automation, to avoid needing to do cross version streaming. Through this approach, we can tolerate loosing a node while the upgrade is in progress and the cluster is in mixed mode of major versions. As part of this talk, I would like to elaborate on what kinds of verification we are doing as well as the upgrade mechanism we have developed to avoid cross version streaming.

Sumanth Pasupuleti is a Senior Software Engineer at Netflix, focusing on innovating and operating at scale, both caching and persistent datastore solutions like EVCache and Cassandra, offered as a platform within Netflix.