Creating an Apache Cassandra Cluster in a Custom VPC

This support documentation page will walk you through the process of provisioning an Instaclustr Managed Apache Cassandra cluster or a data centre in an existing VPC that you manage. This is only possible for those customers who are running an Instaclustr managed cluster in their own cloud account.

Potential Use Cases

Instaclustr has identified the following use cases for this feature:

• Customers with custom/complex network configuration setup. For example, AWS Direct Connect or VPC Transit Gateways networking can all be set up once for a VPC and then that VPC reused for multiple clusters.
• Customers with a fully automated CI/CD implementation for their application that would like to provision and manage clusters running on the Instaclustr Managed platform. Setting up the VPC and peering once and then recreating clusters as necessary will make it easier to implement a fully automated CI/CD.

Enable the Feature for Your Account

Before using this feature you must have it enabled on your account. 

Contact Instaclustr Support to enable the ability to create a Custom VPC cluster or data centre.

Console – Create a New Cluster or Add a Data Centre

Once the feature is enabled, you need to supply the following fields when you create a cluster or add an additional cluster data centre:

Data Centre Options

* If the provided Account, VPC and Region do not match, provisioning of the cluster or data centre will fail and you will need to contact Instaclustr Support.

** The provided VPC must have this address space available; providing an incorrect CIDR or a Data Centre Network that is already taken will cause provisioning to fail and you will need to contact Instaclustr Support.

Provisioning API – Create a New Cluster

For more detailed information about the Provisioning API, see our support documentation.

The example request below will create a 3 node Apache Cassandra 3.11.4 cluster 

Take care to set the following fields correctly:

• accountName, customVirtualNetworkId & dataCentre
  The values for these fields must align with an existing VPC; if not, provisioning of the cluster or data centre will fail and you will need to contact Instaclustr Support.
• clusterNetwork
  The desired custom VPC must have this address space available; providing an incorrect CIDR or an address space that is already occupied will cause provisioning to fail and you will need to contact Instaclustr Support.

What Gets Created?

This information is used by our provisioning system to set up your cluster data centre.

The following objects will get created in the Custom VPC:

• An internet gateway (There have been some problems with Custom VPC using a pre-existing gateway, so try using a new gateway, if you are facing any problems)
• Subnets for the nodes
• Route table to route traffic to these subnets
• Security groups to control access to the nodes
• EC2 Instances – 1 per node
• Public IP address – 1 per node (unless private network cluster)
• EBS disk – as required by node size

Private network clusters have two additional components:

• An EC2 instance acting as an SSH gateway
• A NAT gateway instead of an internet gateway

All of these objects are created by our system and their unique id is stored in our internal database.

Tagging Objects

Instaclustr tags each object it creates. Custom tags may also be added to your account which will also be applied to all objects created. 

In this way, customers can easily identify which objects make up the cluster data centre. For more information on tags, refer to our support article Adding Tags to Clusters.

Deleting Objects

When deprovisioning a cluster, Instaclustr only removes objects that we have created and stored in our database.