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Cassandra Hits One Million Writes Per Second on Google Compute Engine

googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com

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Re: Cassandra Hits One Million Writes Per Second on Google Compute Engine

#3

Post by t0mas88 »

The "one million" number grabs some attention, but this isn't that special in my opinion. Doing 3333 writes/sec per node is not that hard with Cassandra, actually it can be much faster if you use a setup with fast local storage and split for example the data disk from the commit log. The Google article reads as if they used network storage and 1 volume per node, both are bad ideas for Cassandra as documented by Datastax.

Re: Cassandra Hits One Million Writes Per Second on Google Compute Engine

#4

Post by t0mas88 »

outside1234 wrote: post #2

Is anyone actually using Google Compute Engine? I haven't bumped into anyone using it and would love to hear what the real world experience is with it.

I've tested it, network latency is by far not as good as for example Rackspace Cloud. And tool-support is very far behind Amazon and OpenStack. Basically Google Compute Engine is something that might have had a chance years ago but at this point in time it's quite pointless because it has no upsides compared to existing far better established solutions and is behind on features, documentation, tools and user-support.

And I expect that not to get better soon if nobody is using it...

Re: Cassandra Hits One Million Writes Per Second on Google Compute Engine

#5

Post by arielweisberg »

I like Cassandra and I think it's something you should look at hard if what you want is an eventually consistent database because multi-DC and availability are important to the problem you are solving.

The blog post fails to make that case anywhere. I am guessing that is because it is an ad for GCE and not Cassandra.

I know these kinds of benchmarks are necessary to get and keep your widget on the map, but they always annoy me because I know N other ways to arrive at the same or better numbers with a different set of tradeoffs. Demonstrating scale out is not great for differentiation because it says nothing about the total cost or complexity of use.

Why is it that only GCE + Cassandra could have done a million of these particular kind of writes in a cost effective way?

I also feel like they are fudging how elasticity works. It's not instant. Bringing up a cluster of a given size is not the same as adding node at time to a running cluster to arrive at that size and actually receiving full benefit from the additional capacity. From the wording it sounds like the entire cluster was brought up at once.

Overall my beef is that the blog post fails to inform the reader and is mediocre as a benchmark of anything other than GCE. And let's not even start with the complete lack of random reads, does GCE offer SSD instances yet?

Re: Cassandra Hits One Million Writes Per Second on Google Compute Engine

#7

Post by jasonlotito »

t0mas88 wrote: post #3

The "one million" number grabs some attention, but this isn't that special in my opinion. Doing 3333 writes/sec per node is not that hard with Cassandra, actually it can be much faster if you use a setup with fast local storage and split for example the data disk from the commit log. The Google article reads as if they used network storage and 1 volume per node, both are bad ideas for Cassandra as documented by Datas…

Keep in mind, it's not "One Million Writes Per Second," it's "One Million Writes Per Second on Google Compute Engine" with "Google Compute Engine" being the key point to the article.

The "one million writes per second" for Cassandra has been written about before (in this case, on AWS): http://techblog.netflix.com/2011/11/benchmarking-cassandra-s...

Re: Cassandra Hits One Million Writes Per Second on Google Compute Engine

#8

Post by thrownaway2424 »

t0mas88 wrote: post #4
outside1234 wrote: post #2

Is anyone actually using Google Compute Engine? I haven't bumped into anyone using it and would love to hear what the real world experience is with it.

I've tested it, network latency is by far not as good as for example Rackspace Cloud. And tool-support is very far behind Amazon and OpenStack. Basically Google Compute Engine is something that might have had a chance years ago but at this point in time it's quite pointless because it has no upsides compared to existing far better established solutions and is behind on features, documentation, tools and user-support.…

Network latency to or from what?

Re: Cassandra Hits One Million Writes Per Second on Google Compute Engine

#9

Post by thrownaway2424 »

jasonlotito wrote: post #7
t0mas88 wrote: post #3

The "one million" number grabs some attention, but this isn't that special in my opinion. Doing 3333 writes/sec per node is not that hard with Cassandra, actually it can be much faster if you use a setup with fast local storage and split for example the data disk from the commit log. The Google article reads as if they used network storage and 1 volume per node, both are bad ideas for Cassandra as documented by Datas…

Keep in mind, it's not "One Million Writes Per Second," it's "One Million Writes Per Second on Google Compute Engine" with "Google Compute Engine" being the key point to the article. The "one million writes per second" for Cassandra has been written about before (in this case, on AWS): http://techblog.netflix.com/2011/11/benchmarking-cassandra-s...

That post doesn't mention anything about tail latency, while the GCE thing does point to P95 latency < 100ms consistently, which is nice.
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