Mar 2
Save Hours on Your Setup with K8ssandra Config Builder
Author: Matthew Overstreet
Setting up K8ssandra in your workflow just got a whole lot easier. With the new Config Builder you can be running Apache Cassandra® on Kubernetes in minutes.
The drive behind K8ssandra was to make it easy to run Apache Cassandra on Kubernetes. Recently, our team took another generous step in that direction with the release of the K8ssandra Config Builder.
Even if you’ve created thousands of nodes or have already integrated K8ssandra in your stack, you’ll want to give the config builder a try. To get a production-ready K8ssandra environment in minutes, simply walk through the interactive wizard to define the shape of your cluster, select your resource requirements, and toggle the features your project needs.
If you’re new(er) to K8ssandra, the Config Builder will help you save hours of getting your environment up and running. Just choose one of the predefined templates as a starting point with preconfigured cloud-specific options.
As of this writing, you can take your pick between a custom configuration and templates for Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Azure AKS, Digital Ocean, Amazon EKS, or a local setup of K8ssandra.
That said, let’s dig a little deeper into what the K8ssandra Config Builder can do for you.
Write hundreds of lines of code with a couple of clicks
As you may know, K8ssandra is an open-source platform for production deployments of Cassandra on Kubernetes. This includes everything you want to run alongside them like your monitoring system, repair process (Reaper) and backups.
However, the default configuration file involves hundreds of lines. We knew we could make it easier. So, we built the K8ssandra Config Builder where all you have to do is set your preferred parameters, like:
- Limits for deployments
- Storage requirements
- Size and number of nodes
- Racks and logical data centers
When writing your own YAML file, you need to know the right values and sane limits. But with the Config Builder you don’t need to worry about that. Once you have the file, you can just run a helm install and get a cluster running.
The Config Builder also adjusts your settings to keep you within the limits that make sense. So you can’t request 32 GB of Heap for Cassandra if you only have 16 GB of RAM available, due to your quotas.
When you’re done (or even at a stopping point), you can click copy or share to get going yourself or to share the configuration with a colleague to collaborate.
Sure, there might still be instances where you want to write the YAML file yourself. But if you get stuck on something, the Config Builder is the fastest way to overcome it.
What’s next for the K8ssandra Config Builder
Our goal is to give you a seamless experience while building anything in K8ssandra. So we’re constantly working on new features for the K8ssandra Config Builder that we’ll proudly release in the near future.
The features at the top of our to-do list are:
- Linking to the Config Builder from the K8ssandra install documentation to the specific YAML file template
- Syntax highlighting the code and line numbers
- User experience improvements
As always, our priorities depend on the feedback we get from the people using the config builder. Hopefully after reading this post, you’ll be one of them. Take the K8ssandra Config Builder for a spin and tell us what you think.
Join our buzzing K8ssandra Discord to get help from the community, or ask us your questions in the K8ssandra Forum.
Originally posted on K8ssandra.io
Resources
- Try out the K8ssandra Config Builder
- Join the K8ssandra Community
- Kubernetes and Apache Cassandra: What Works (and What Doesn’t)
- K8ssandra documentation
- Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)
- Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
- Digital Ocean cloud infrastructure
- Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)
