Cassandra: Tuning and Real-life War Stories

We are happy to announce that we have another meetup scheduled at ING. This time around we want to focus on some real world use cases and their war stories.

Schedule:

• 18.00-18.40 Reception
• 18.40-19.20 Presentation 1
• 19:20-20.00 Presentation 2
• 20:00-20:20 Break
• 20.20-21.00 Presentation 3
• 21.00-22.00 Drinks

Location:

Location code: HBP A0.08 (ING - Haarlerbergpark (https://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=Haarlerbergweg+13+-+23+%2C+1101CH+%2C+Amsterdam+Zuid-Oost%2C+nl))

Please let us know if you require a parking space and we will try our best to arrange a parking space. ING staff will need to arrange their own parking space.

Speakers:

Matija Gobec
Polyglot Engineer at SmartCat

Title:
When every millisecond counts

Abstract:
There are many aspects of tuning Cassandra for production and a lot can go wrong: network splits and latency, hardware issues and failure, data corruption, etc. Most are mitigated with Cassandra’s architecture but there are use cases where we need to dig deep and tune all layers to get the result we need to achieve specific business goals. We will explore such case where we had to tune Cassandra for performance but also have consistent results on 99.999% of the queries. Getting even to 99 percent was relatively easy, but pushing those extra nines involved a lot of work. There are many nuts and bolts to turn and tune in order to get consistent results. We will cover biggest latency-inducing factors and see how to set up metrics and tackle inevitable issues when doing cloud-based deployments. We will get into one of the major “sins” regarding AWS deployment by demystifying EBS based storage and talk about how we can leverage OS properties while tuning for high read performance.

Bio:
Matija Gobec is a polyglot engineer with open minded approach to technologies. Always looking for new challenges and seeking for knowledge. Active Cassandra engineer for over 4 years, among first engineers to be Cassandra Certified at Cassandra Summit 2015. Featured on Cassandra planet and teaching at Apache Con in Budapest, he is an active community contributor with strong technical focus and dedicated approach that shows in his work and experience sharing events locally and globally.

Will Bleker - Middleware Engineer at ING

Abstract:

more Chaos than a barrel of Monkeys

Cassandra has proven its ability to survive a fair amount of chaos out in the wild. However introducing a new technology like this in a company that is in the middle of the paradigm shift needs a lot testing and retesting.

Enter the monkeys ….

ChaosMonkey is a great addition to the current set of tools used for availability testing, helping to find flaws and bugs in not only applications, but complete environments. Come join us and discover the journey of the monkeys in ING and their love hate relationship with Cassandra.

Bio:

Will Bleker: Certified Redhat and former Solaris cluster engineer with experience in High Available, High Performance and distributed systems. Spent the last year in DevOps teams that are helping ING change from a world where the uptime of the application is more important than the uptime server. As part of the ChaosMonkey team since day one he is one of the evangelists who introduced ING DevOps teams to the monkeys, and continues to train the monkeys to become more clever.

Last talk is still to be determined.

DIRECTIONS:

From the direction Den Haag/Zaandam:

From the A10 motorway take the A2 motorway towards Utrecht. Then take the exit to the A9 motorway in the direction of Amersfoort. * On the A9, take the first exit S111 Zuidoost / AMC. At the traffic lights at the end of the exit, turn right on to the Muntbergweg. Follow this road under the viaduct and after the next traffic lights keep right and take the turn-off to the right, on to the Laarderhoogtweg. Turn right immediately after the Shell service station onto the Hullenbergweg. Here you will see the Ikea warehouse on the right-hand side. After 100 meters you see Haarlerbergpark on the right.

From the direction Utrecht/Den Bosch:

Follow the A2 motorway towards Amsterdam. Take the A9 motorway in the direction of Amersfoort. Follow the description above from *.

From the direction Amersfoort:

Follow the A1 motorway towards Amsterdam. Near Muiden take the A9 motorway in the direction of Amstelveen. On the A9 take the exit S111 Zuidoost / AMC. At the traffic lights at the end of the exit, turn right and immediately take the first turn-off to the right on to the Laarderhoogtweg. Turn right immediately after the Shell service station on to the Hullenbergweg. Here you will see the Ikea warehouse on the right-hand side. After 100 meters you see Haarlerbergpark on the right.

METRO:

Location Haarlerbergpark is about a five minute walk from Bullewijk metro station and about a fifteen minute walk from the Amsterdam Bijlmer Arena train station.