Cassandra is probably the best example of out-of-bound success of the community-driven open source project. Netflix contributes heavily to Cassandra projects. Netflix's cluster management tool, Priam, simplifies the administration of large clusters over Amazon Web Service's EC2 cloud platform. Unfortunately, detailed discussion on Priam is out of the scope of this book. The wiki page of the project is not extensive either.
Priam is a Java-based web application, primarily for the following tasks:
- Token assignment
- Backup and restoration
- Configuration management
- API to query Cassandra metrics
As an advice, for a small cluster setup (say, under 25 nodes), it is suggested to stick with simple automation based on nodetool and perhaps a shell or Python script. It will keep the administration simple. Priam requires too many parameters to set it up and perhaps it is more work for smaller clusters than to manage it manually.
More information about Priam, setup, and scaling procedures can be learned from its GitHub page: https://github.com/Netflix/Priam/wiki.