Tombstones are notorious for causing issues in Apache Cassandra. They often become a problem when Cassandra is not able to purge them in a timely fashion. Delays in purging happen because there are a number of conditions that must be met before a tombstone can be dropped.

Next week we’ll be in Las Vegas for the North American ApacheCon Conference. From the TLP consulting team Anthony will be giving a talk on the open source tooling we’ve developed to provision and stress test clusters. Aaron and I will be at our booth giving demos all week. We’d love to chat with you about Cassandra internals, application development, performance tuning, our open source tools, Cassandra best practices, and hear your story. We’ll also be more than happy to give you a demo of something special we’ve been working on this year.

We’re very pleased to announce the 1.0 release of tlp-stress! tlp-stress is a workload centric benchmarking tool we’ve built for Apache Cassandra to make performance testing easier. We introduced it around this time last year and have used it to do a variety of testing for ourselves, customers, and the Cassandra project itself. We’re very happy with how far it’s come and we’re excited to share it with the world as a stable release. You can read about some of the latest features in our blog post from last month. The main difference between tlp-stress and cassandra stress is the inclusion of workloads out of the box. You should be able to get up and running with tlp-stress in under 5 minutes, testing the most commonly used data models and access patterns.

Overview

This article looks at hostname verification for internode encryption, which is designed to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks. This is a follow-up to the first hardening Cassandra post that explored internode encryption. If you have not already done so, take a moment and read through the earlier post before proceeding.