Testing Cassandra 1000 Nodes at a Time

Software Engineers at Datastax perform a "1000 Node Test" to ensure that their users can trust DataStax Enterprise for handling large-scale "Big Data". This test involves setting up and running operations on a 1000 node cluster, testing standard administrative operations under load. The process includes provisioning nodes, configuring datacenters, inserting data, altering replication strategies, running repair operations, and verifying readability of written data. Challenges encountered during this test include initial provisioning and installation of software, which can be mitigated by using a single base node for installations and leveraging cloud providers' snapshot capabilities to speed up the process. As data continues to grow, Datastax plans to conduct tests on even larger clusters with greater volumes of data in the future.