Administer database clusters

Mission Control clusters are objects describing the topology and settings of Hyper-Converged Database (HCD), DataStax Enterprise (DSE), and Apache Cassandra® database instances.

Projects

Mission Control organizes clusters into projects. You can create a separate project for each cluster, or you can group related clusters into the same project. If you don’t already have a project, create a project in Mission Control before provisioning clusters.

Cluster lifecycle

Database cluster management encompasses the entire lifecycle of cluster components. This includes creating datacenter-level resources across Kubernetes cluster boundaries, orchestrating automation steps at appropriate intervals given a specific cluster state, and remediating issues as they arise.

Given the distributed nature of Mission Control, there are Kubernetes operators local to each Kubernetes cluster that respond to events within the local cluster. This enables continuous operations and remediation even during periods of network partitioning.

Cluster lifecycle tasks

DataStax recommends storing your cluster manifest in a Git repository to make the cluster provisioning process traceable and repeatable.

Use your pre-configured cluster manifest to create a new cluster using either the UI or a CLI command. The manifest exposes a partial subset of the MissionControlCluster resource definition that you can change by editing the cluster manifest.

Datacenter lifecycle tasks

Node lifecycle tasks

Access the Mission Control UI

Mission Control provides a UI through the IP address of any node using port 30880 on the Control-Plane cluster. For example, issue https://10.0.0.3:30880 from a web browser, where 10.0.0.3 is a qualifying nodes' IP address. For more information, see Access Mission Control’s UI.

Access the CLI

Mission Control uses a kubectl CLI tool. The Kubernetes kubectl command-line tool, version 1.22 or later, enables you to run commands programmatically against Kubernetes clusters through the K8s API server.

Declarative and imperative operations

Interactions with Mission Control are broadly categorized as declarative or imperative. Use declarative APIs to define a desired end-state, and then Mission Control constantly takes steps to achieve that declared goal. For example, you would define a DataStax Enterprise (DSE) or Hyper-Converged Database (HCD) cluster or datacenter through declarative APIs because these are long-lived resources. In comparison, imperative APIs describe a singular operation or task to be run to completion with an associated status. Imperative APIs within Mission Control include operational tasks on a specified cluster, such as performing a rolling restart.

Perform declarative or imperative operations at either the cluster or the datacenter level. For example:

Cleanup: Run the nodetool cleanup command for specific keyspaces on all nodes in a particular datacenter (DC).
Rebuild: Run the nodetool rebuild command across a datacenter to populate data by streaming from another (source) datacenter (DC).
Replace a node: Replaces an existing node with a new, empty pod owning the same token ranges.
Rolling Restart: Restart all nodes in a cluster in a rolling fashion while applications continue to run with zero downtime.
Backup data: Backs up Hyper-Converged Database (HCD), DataStax Enterprise (DSE), and Cassandra data in Kubernetes.
Restore a data backup: Restores Hyper-Converged Database (HCD), DataStax Enterprise (DSE), and Cassandra data in Kubernetes.
Upgrade SSTables: Upgrade all SSTables to newer formats where required.