Before shutting down your cluster instances, there are some additional commands that should be run. Again, with your own, local node(s), these are not terribly necessary. But it is a good idea to get used to running these, should you ever need to properly shut down a production node that may contain data that people actually care about.
First, we will disable gossip. This keeps other nodes from communicating with the node while we are trying to bring it down:
bin/nodetool disablegossip
Next, we will disable the native binary protocol to keep this node from serving client requests:
bin/nodetool disablebinary
Then, we will drain the node. This will prevent it from accepting writes, and force all in-memory data to be written to disk:
bin/nodetool drain
With the node drained, we can kill the PID:
kill 'cat cassandra.pid'
We can verify that the node has stopped by tailing the log:
tail logs/system.log
INFO [RMI TCP Connection(2)-127.0.0.1] 2018-03-31 17:49:05,789 StorageService.java:2292 - Node localhost/192.168.0.101 state jump to shutdown
INFO [RMI TCP Connection(4)-127.0.0.1] 2018-03-31 17:49:49,492 Server.java:176 - Stop listening for CQL clients
INFO [RMI TCP Connection(6)-127.0.0.1] 2018-03-31 17:50:11,312 StorageService.java:1449 - DRAINING: starting drain process
INFO [RMI TCP Connection(6)-127.0.0.1] 2018-03-31 17:50:11,313 HintsService.java:220 - Paused hints dispatch
INFO [RMI TCP Connection(6)-127.0.0.1] 2018-03-31 17:50:11,314 Gossiper.java:1540 - Announcing shutdown
INFO [RMI TCP Connection(6)-127.0.0.1] 2018-03-31 17:50:11,314 StorageService.java:2292 - Node localhost/192.168.0.101 state jump to shutdown
INFO [RMI TCP Connection(6)-127.0.0.1] 2018-03-31 17:50:13,315 MessagingService.java:984 - Waiting for messaging service to quiesce
INFO [ACCEPT-localhost/192.168.0.101] 2018-03-31 17:50:13,316 MessagingService.java:1338 - MessagingService has terminated the accept() thread
INFO [RMI TCP Connection(6)-127.0.0.1] 2018-03-31 17:50:14,764 HintsService.java:220 - Paused hints dispatch
INFO [RMI TCP Connection(6)-127.0.0.1] 2018-03-31 17:50:14,861 StorageService.java:1449 - DRAINED