When you start working with large, production-level clusters, having a good orchestration tool can save you a lot of work. After all, building and configuring a three-node cluster is one thing, but building and maintaining a 300 node cluster requires a different approach.
This comes into play when cluster-wide changes must be applied, such as a new SSL certificate or an upgrade to a new patch level. Manual methods, which are fine for the three-node cluster, quickly become untenable at a large scale.
For some Cassandra teams, a collection of Python or shell scripts will suffice for running some of the repeatable parts of their deployment process. But as scale increases and configurations change, this approach relies on the team to adjust the scripts so that they continue to work with changing requirements.
As the problems of maintaining a distributed...