Cassandra is a highly scalable database with an architecture that makes it well suited for multi-region workloads. As companies are standardizing on Kubernetes, they often want their clusters to span across multiple zones within a single region. However, multi-region Kubernetes clusters have serious technical challenges to overcome to be used in production. The challenge of handling stateful workloads on a multi-cluster Kubernetes setup, and more specifically with Kubernetes operators, was heavily discussed at KubeCon EU 2022.
In this presentation, DataStax Software Engineer John Sanda introduces K8ssandra Operator, which has been designed specifically to address the issue of running Cassandra on a Kubernetes multi-cluster deployment. John discusses how it was designed, how to reconcile objects across multiple clusters, how to manage secrets, pitfalls to avoid, and testing strategies. All of this knowledge can be ported to build other multi-cluster-friendly Kubernetes operators.