So far, we have been running a single Cassandra node to store all our data. This isn't how it is ideally supposed to run. This defeats the purpose of Cassandra being a distributed database. As you saw in the previous chapter, every Cassandra node stores a subset of data, which is based on the token range assigned to that node. Multiple nodes will have overlapping token ranges in case the replication factor is higher than 1. In our case, the entire token range resides on the single node that we have been running. To demonstrate the distributed nature of Cassandra and take an in-depth look at whatever concepts we learnt in the previous chapter, we will set up a 3-node cluster and perform various operations.
Setting up a multinode cluster is slightly different from setting up the single-node cluster that we have been using so far. For a single-node cluster, leaving all the configuration options is usually sufficient. The same doesn't apply to a 3-node...