An evaluation of Cassandra NoSQL database on a low-power cluster

The constant growth of social media, unconventional web technologies, mobile applications, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices, create challenges for cloud data systems in order to support huge datasets and very high request rates. NoSQL distributed databases such as Cassandra have been used for unstructured data storage and to increase horizontal scalability and high availability. In this paper, we evaluated Cassandra on a low-power low-cost cluster of commodity Single Board Computers (SBC). The cluster has 15 Raspberry Pi v3 nodes with Docker Swarm orchestration tool for Cassandra service deployment and ingress load balancing over SBCs. Experimental results demonstrated that hardware limitations impacted workload throughput, but read and write latencies were comparable to results from other works on high-end or virtualized platforms. Despite the observed limitations, the results show that a low-cost SBC cluster can support cloud serving goals such as scale-out, elasticity and high availability.