Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by hardwaresofton 4440 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.
1 comments
opendais 4440 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.

link
anonymouse01 4440 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.

link
opendais 4440 days ago
Why would you want to maintain a separate service discovery cluster?
link
anonymouse01 4439 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.

link
hardwaresofton 4440 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).

link