PAX: Partition-Aware Autoscaling for the Cassandra NoSQL Database

Apache Cassandra has emerged as one of the most widely adopted NoSQL databases. However, there is still a limited understanding on how to optimally operate Cassandra in the cloud using autoscaling methods, by which resources can be scaled up or down to reduce operational costs and meet service-level objectives (SLOs).

To address this limitation, we present PAX, a partition-aware elastic resource management system for Apache Cassandra. PAX uses low-overhead query sampling and knowledge of the data-partitioning across the nodes to automatically adapt capacity in Cassandra clusters. Differently from existing autoscaling methods for Cassandra, which incur large acquisition times for new nodes, PAX exploits Cassandra's hinted handoff mechanism and a shared hints storage to minimize the time needed to acquire a node into the cluster.

We propose a reactive and a proactive implementation of PAX and compare their performance against different workloads with varying intensities and item popularity distributions, finding that the proactive version significantly reduces SLO violations.