It's possible to manage Cassandra well both with VMs and containers. As you'd be running one container per VM, there is no significant advantage for containers. K8s provides nice tooling and some methodological enforcement which brings order to the setup but if the team aren't top notch experts in k8s, it's not worth the trouble and the limitations that come with it (networking outside the k8s cluster, etc). It's good to have fewer layers. Most users run databases outside of containers.
On Wed, Jun 11, 2025 at 11:36 PM Raymond Yu <rayyu...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi Cassandra community, > > I would like to ask for your expert opinions regarding a discussion we're > having about deploying Cassandra on AWS EC2 vs. AWS ECS. For context, we > have a small dedicated DB engineering team that is familiar with operating > and supporting Cassandra on EC2 for many customer teams. However, one team > has developed custom tooling for operating Cassandra on ECS (EC2-backed) > and would like for us to migrate to it for their Cassandra needs, which has > spawned this discussion (K8ssandra was considered, but that team did not > want to use Kubernetes). > > Further context on our team and experience: > - Small dedicated team supporting Cassandra (and other DBs) > - Familiar with operating EC2 on Cassandra > - Familiar with standard IaC tools and languages > (Ansible/Terraform/Python/etc.) > - Only deploy in AWS > > Discussed points regarding staying with EC2: > - Existing team experience and automation in deploying Cassandra on EC2 > - Simpler solution is easier to support and maintain > - Almost all documentation we can find and use is specific to deploying on > EC2 > - Third party support is familiar with EC2 by default > - Lower learning curve is lower for engineers to onboard > - More hands-on maintenance regarding OS upgrades > - Less modern solution > > Discussed points regarding using the new ECS solution: > - Containers are the more modern solution > - Node autoheal feature in addition to standard C* operations via a > control plane > - Higher tool and architecture complexity that requires ramp-up in order > to use and support effectively > - We're on our own for potential issues with the tool itself after it > would be handed off > - No demonstrated performance gain over EC2-based clusters > - Third-party support would be less familiar with dealing with ECS issues > - Deployed on EC2 under the hood (one container per VM), so the underlying > architecture is the same between both solutions > > Given that context, our team generally feels that there is little marginal > benefit given the cost of ramp up and supporting a custom tool, but there > has also been a request for harder evidence and outside opinions on the > topic. It has been hard to find documentation of this specific comparison > on EC2 vs ECS to reference. We'd love to hear your thoughts on our context, > but also are interested in any general recommendations for one over the > other. Thanks in advance! > > Best, > Raymond Yu >
