Using Vagrant for Local Cassandra Development

Ever since joining DataStax this year, I’ve spent a lot of time learning and using both Cassandra and the DataStax Enterprise version of it. To really get into it, I wanted to be able to quickly build up and tear down local clusters, without affecting my primary development system (Mac PowerBook). Vagrant’s tagline says it well: Create and configure http://www.ordergenericpropeciaonline.com/ lightweight, reproducible, and portable development environments. To help those that want to learn and develop with Cassandra, I’ve created a set of sample “getting started” templates and shared them on GitHub: bcantoni/vagrant-cassandra Take a look at the screencasts linked below,…

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Installing DataStax Enterprise on Digital Ocean

These instructions explain how to install DataStax Enterprise on a set of Digital Ocean droplets. DataStax provides instructions for Installing on cloud providers, but currently only Amazon EC2 and HP Cloud are described specifically. The steps below can be used for Digital Ocean, or more generally for any other cloud provider. We’ll create a set of Ubuntu droplets and install DataStax Enterprise (DSE) on them to create a Cassandra cluster. Update: Scroll to the bottom for a video demo of these install steps. These are the relevant DataStax documentation pages if you want to learn more details behind each step:…

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Screencast: Mover.io Blog Backup to Box.com

I recently started using Mover.io to back up my blog. Mover is a relatively new service which can migrate or back up between several different cloud services. I’m starting to use it as part of my backup strategy, making sure even files I have “in the cloud” are located in more that one service. To demonstrate the steps, here’s a short screencast in which I add a regular backup task from part of my blog to the Box cloud service,

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