This looks really interesting; thanks for putting this together! Just so I'm clear on CEP nomenclature, having external management of metadata as a non-goal doesn't preclude some future use, correct? Coincidentally, I'm working on my ApacheCon talk on improving modularity in Cassandra and one of the ideas I'm discussing is pluggably (?) replacing gossip with something(s) that allow us to externalize some of the complexity of maintaining consistency. I need to digest the proposal you've made, but I don't see the two ideas being at odds on my first read.
Cheers, Derek On Mon, Aug 22, 2022 at 6:45 AM Sam Tunnicliffe <s...@beobal.com> wrote: > Hi, > > I'd like to open discussion about this CEP: > https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/CASSANDRA/CEP-21%3A+Transactional+Cluster+Metadata > <https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/CASSANDRA/CEP-21:+Transactional+Cluster+Metadata> > > Cluster metadata in Cassandra comprises a number of disparate elements > including, but not limited to, distributed schema, topology and token > ownership. Following the general design principles of Cassandra, the > mechanisms for coordinating updates to cluster state have favoured eventual > consistency, with probabilisitic delivery via gossip being a prime example. > Undoubtedly, this approach has benefits, not least in terms of resilience, > particularly in highly fluid distributed environments. However, this is not > the reality of most Cassandra deployments, where the total number of nodes > is relatively small (i.e. in the low thousands) and the rate of change > tends to be low. > > Historically, a significant proportion of issues affecting operators and > users of Cassandra have been due, at least in part, to a lack of strongly > consistent cluster metadata. In response to this, we propose a design which > aims to provide linearizability of metadata changes whilst ensuring that > the effects of those changes are made visible to all nodes in a strongly > consistent manner. At its core, it is also pluggable, enabling > Cassandra-derived projects to supply their own implementations if desired. > In addition to the CEP document itself, we aim to publish a working > prototype of the proposed design. Obviously, this does not implement the > entire proposal and there are several parts which remain only partially > complete. It does include the core of the system, including a good deal of > test infrastructure, so may serve as both illustration of the design and a > starting point for real implementation. > > -- +---------------------------------------------------------------+ | Derek Chen-Becker | | GPG Key available at https://keybase.io/dchenbecker and | | https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?search=derek%40chen-becker.org | | Fngrprnt: EB8A 6480 F0A3 C8EB C1E7 7F42 AFC5 AFEE 96E4 6ACC | +---------------------------------------------------------------+
