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new 7324a6f CASSANDRA-17157: Added blog post in November 2021 titled
"Inside Cassandra: an interview with Marcel Birkner at Instana"
7324a6f is described below
commit 7324a6f2623dd39d140bf9ad6394bb9208cfb1d6
Author: Diogenese Topper <[email protected]>
AuthorDate: Tue Nov 16 16:18:00 2021 -0800
CASSANDRA-17157: Added blog post in November 2021 titled "Inside Cassandra:
an interview with Marcel Birkner at Instana"
Blog post titled "Inside Cassandra: an interview with Marcel Birkner at
Instana"
Modified blog index page
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site-content/source/modules/ROOT/pages/blog.adoc | 25 ++++++++++
...n-interview-with-Marcel-Birkner-at-Instana.adoc | 52 +++++++++++++++++++++
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@@ -14,6 +14,31 @@ NOTES FOR CONTENT CREATORS
[openblock,card-header]
------
[discrete]
+=== Inside Cassandra: an interview with Marcel Birkner at Instana
+[discrete]
+==== November 17, 2021
+------
+[openblock,card-content]
+------
+We interview Marcel Birkner, Site Reliability Engineer at Instana, how they
use Apache Cassandra to store and process the metric data at scale and benefit
from Cassandra’s fault tolerance, and have learned the importance of
dog-fooding.
+
+[openblock,card-btn card-btn--blog]
+--------
+
+[.btn.btn--alt]
+xref:blog/Inside-Cassandra-an-interview-with-Marcel-Birkner-at-Instana.adoc[Read
More]
+--------
+
+------
+----
+//end card
+
+//start card
+[openblock,card shadow relative test]
+----
+[openblock,card-header]
+------
+[discrete]
=== What the Future Holds for Apache Cassandra
[discrete]
==== October 26, 2021
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+= Inside Cassandra: an interview with Marcel Birkner at Instana
+:page-layout: single-post
+:page-role: blog-post
+:page-post-date: November 17, 2021
+:page-post-author: The Apache Cassandra Community
+:description: The Apache Cassandra Community
+:keywords:
+
+Patrick McFadin, Apache Cassandra community member, sat down with Marcel
Birkner, Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) at Instana, an IBM Company. They
discussed the unique challenge faced by the company as it strives to scale
highly useful telemetry with a responsive query system. This article uses
extracts from that conversation, which took place before IBM acquired the
business.
+
+One of the constants of life as an SRE is that
https://www.instana.com/blog/life-of-an-sre-at-instana-things-break-all-the-time-in-distributed-systems-part-1-clickhouse/[things
break all the time,window=_blank]. If developers are expanding what the
product can do, and operations are making sure everything keeps running
smoothly, SREs often fill that annoying gap between theory and practice. They
fix things as they break, set up alerts to enable them to know the next time it
breaks, and k [...]
+
+Instana, which IBM acquired in 2020, delivers application performance
management software for modern cloud-native environments and is designed to
create closed-loop DevOps automation. Instana has developed a high-performance,
high-scale architecture which can capture 100% of transactions in one-second
intervals across an extensive distributed application in a hybrid cloud. It
collects billions of metrics per day in real-time and uses Apache Cassandra to
store and process the metric data [...]
+
+== Finding the Sweet Spot for Scaling
+
+Instana writes for some of its clusters are “250,000 to 1,200,000 metrics per
second,” says Marcel, who has been an SRE at Instana for almost four years. By
any standard, that’s a huge amount of data ingestion for a distributed
workload. But instead of just throwing additional nodes at each problem, Marcel
and his team have tried to find the scaling for each node that would perform
the best. “The big challenge there is finding the right balance between
resources and performance for each [...]
+
+image::blog/inside-Cassandra-Marcel-Birkner/image2.png[sweet spot]
+Stats for one Metrics Cassandra cluster: 380k writes/sec, 9k reads/sec,
overall great latency.
+
+The challenge of knowing when to scale horizontally, when to scale vertically,
and when to scale down to save money is something every operations or
reliability engineer has faced in the real world. “There’s no single answer for
all use cases,” says Marcel, but he sees close monitoring of your system as
part of the solution: If you don’t know the effect that resource allocation is
having on your service, there’s no way to optimize.
+
+== Monitoring a Monitoring Service
+
+In many ways, monitoring, or its buzzword cousin observability, is the
lifeblood of any SRE’s work. At a company whose product is monitoring, the act
of monitoring your own services is ‘dog-fooding’ at its finest.
+
+“We are a monitoring company, and we monitor the things that we use ourselves
the best,” says Marcel. And really, it makes sense: any time a monitoring
company is surprised by resource overruns or over-provisioning that has
budgetary impacts, the jokes kind of write themselves.
+
+Marcel monitors a stack where most components are running as part of a
cluster, and, as such, there is fault-tolerance built-in thanks, in part, to
Cassandra: “a single failing node does not impact our customers. Our system is
built to handle these kinds of things. Nevertheless, it is critical to resolve
these problems so that they do not escalate.”
+
+When you begin on your journey to a well-monitored system, the first step is
always the monitoring and alerts that come built-in. For Marcel and the team,
Cassandra’s built-in tools were part of the picture from the outset. “Since we
use Apache Cassandra heavily ourselves, there's a lot of built-in alerts,” he
told Patrick. A variety of metrics are crucial to understanding service health,
such as: “the queuing mutation requests or whether there's high CPU load now on
nodes, or if there a [...]
+
+image::blog/inside-Cassandra-Marcel-Birkner/image3.png[single metrics node 1]
+
+image::blog/inside-Cassandra-Marcel-Birkner/image5.png[single metrics node 2]
+
+image::blog/inside-Cassandra-Marcel-Birkner/image4.png[single metrics node 3]
+Detailed statistics for a single metrics Cassandra node.
+
+When scaling, experimentation is vital. Monitoring is a crucial component here
since operators need to answer whether modifying provisioning helped at all.
“We’re able to monitor very closely what’s happening on the host while we tweak
everything, and that lets us compare before and after the tweaks,” says Marcel.
+
+image::blog/inside-Cassandra-Marcel-Birkner/image1.png[1 second metrics
resolution]
+1-second metrics resolution helps us identify even small spikes in metrics
when making infrastructure changes.
+
+== Using Monitoring needs to Grow the Product
+
+The most important benefit of ‘dog-fooding,’ or using your own product the way
your customers do, is the way it highlights how the service needs to expand.
For Marcel, that meant finding additional monitoring needs. “So the thing is,
we monitor all aspects like network disk I/O on the host JVM [...] if we are
missing metrics, we just write the sensor for it, to get additional metrics.”
+
+“If we have problems as an SRE team, and we don't have the insights, we just
tell our engineering team,” says Marcel. “Then they just enhance the product,
either by new data routes or by new data that they're collecting from the
different technologies we monitor. And that makes our lives a lot easier.”
+
+Head here for more information on
https://cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest/cassandra/operating/metrics.html[monitoring
and metrics within Apache Cassandra], and for a list of third-party projects,
tools, and products, head to the project’s
https://cassandra.apache.org/_/ecosystem.html[Ecosystem page].
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