如何从集群外部连接到Cassandra

Question

I am currently learning Cassandra using datastax tutorials and other online resources. I got the main concepts and feature of it, but I miss one crucial thing of the whole picture, which is how to connect to Cassandra from outside the cluster.

More in detail, the information I cannot find is whether Cassandra needs a node of the cluster to act as a sever for incoming requests and to dispatch them to the other ones, or if it comes with an embedded mechanism to balance them in the cluster. Any kind of information (from low-level to advanced) is welcome.

Thank you all in advance!

Answer 1

Typically one would connect using one of the native protocol client drivers . The drivers take as configuration one or more server nodes as "contact points". They connect to one of these nodes and read server metadata to "discover" the rest of the cluster.

While any node in the cluster can act as a request coordinator, drivers also use some type of load balancing to spread traffic over the cluster, and routing to send requests to nodes that actually have replicas (avoiding unnecessary hops).