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by opendais 4446 days ago
I wasn't trying to start a complex argument in someone else's thread. Sorry. Maybe we should drop it and/or discuss elsewhere?

I think you misunderstood what I was talking about based on your explanation with a single physical machine running a single database instance and manually adding nodes requiring human intervention.
1 comments
hardwaresofton 4446 days ago
Ah OK, was feeling I was explaining far too much -- no worries, but if HN is no longer a place for complex arguments, I think it'd be a lot less valuable... Also, me being wrong certainly sounds like a great chance for Hashicorp people to correct me.
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opendais 4446 days ago
You were looking at very, very old documentation which is why I wanted to drop it. Cassandra is on 2.0 and uses a practically identical consensus algorithm [Paxos] to Consul [Raft] except for the implementation details. I'm not sure how much practical advantage something like Consul has over a discovery layer built on Cassandra.

I didn't see a good way to sort this conversation out without a very, very long conversation in a thread dedicated to a release announcement.

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anonymouse01 4446 days ago
Consul is a totally different thing to Cassandra. Consul could be built on top of Cassandra, but it would not provide any advantages. Why would you want to maintain a separate datastore?

Consul is a single static binary that uses around 11MB of RAM. Cassandra is a complex distributed datastore that requires the JVM and uses many gigabytes of RAM.

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opendais 4446 days ago
Why would you want to maintain a separate service discovery cluster?
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anonymouse01 4445 days ago
Cassandra is not a service discovery cluster...

I think you're missing the point here. I don't know what else can be explained better.

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hardwaresofton 4446 days ago
Well you definitely just cleared it up, thanks -- was completely wrong in my assumptions. Looks like armon from consul team has answered, that's probably a much better way to go.

I did see that the documentation was very old (notice @ top of page I linked) -- I switched to this: http://www.datastax.com/documentation/cassandra/2.0/cassandr...

Still -- I think that consul is a more generic tool than Cassandra. The cluster-management tools I see on their page seem to be java-focused, if not cassandra-focused (as in, outside of just managing the cassandra cluster, JConsole manages java apps, supposedly, not any kind of app that can make an HTTP request, which Consul seems to offer).

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