Managing clusters

DataStax Mission Control is currently in Public Preview. DataStax Mission Control is not intended for production use, has not been certified for production workloads, and might contain bugs and other functional issues. There is no guarantee that DataStax Mission Control will ever become generally available. DataStax Mission Control is provided on an “AS IS” basis, without warranty or indemnity of any kind.

If you are interested in trying out DataStax Mission Control please join the Public Preview.

DataStax Mission Control clusters are objects describing the topology and settings of Apache Cassandra^® and DataStax Enterprise (DSE) database instances.

Through the Mission Control User Interface (UI)

DataStax 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 node’s IP address.

Create a new cluster

DataStax Mission Control organizes clusters by projects. After creating at least one project and clicking on it in the UI sidebar, you can create a new cluster by clicking on the Create Cluster button on the Project page:

This displays the Create Cluster form:

Required fields are annotated with a red asterisk. The form does not allow you to submit it if any of the required fields are missing.
The version number is expected in the
```
 #.#.#
```
format (for example, 0.8.0), and should point to a valid version of Apache Cassandra or DataStax Enterprise that DataStax Mission Control supports. Supported versions evolve from one release to the next. Refer to the DataStax supported software and retention policy.

Please refer to the DataStax Mission Control Release Notes for a complete list of supported versions.

You are required to specify at least one datacenter and one rack to create a cluster. You can add more datacenters and racks upon creation or during cluster modification.
Clicking the Create Cluster button creates the cluster and redirects you to the Project page which should display the newly created cluster in a card:

The card list is limited to three clusters. Display the complete list by clicking on the Clusters → sidebar menu item:

This displays the list of clusters and datacenters:

Access the cluster manifest

In order to provide traceability and repeatability of the cluster creation process, the recommendation is to store the cluster manifest in a Git repository.

Use the cluster manifest to create a cluster with the kubectl apply command:

kubectl apply -f <manifest-filename>.yaml

The form also exposes a partial subset of the MissionControlCluster resource definition, which can be changed by editing the cluster manifest.

In order to display the cluster manifest, click on the Output button of the Cluster Creation page:

Through a Command Line Interface (CLI)

The Kubernetes kubectl command-line tool, v1.22 or later, enables you to run commands programmatically against Kubernetes (K8s) clusters through the K8s API server.

Create a new cluster

The cluster manifest is generated from a MissionControlCluster resource definition. Here is an example of a cluster definition:

apiVersion: missioncontrol.datastax.com/v1beta1
kind: MissionControlCluster
metadata:
  name: test
  namespace: <project-slug>
spec:
  k8ssandra:
    cassandra:
      serverVersion: 6.8.36
      serverType: dse
      storageConfig:
        cassandraDataVolumeClaimSpec:
          storageClassName: standard
          accessModes:
            - ReadWriteOnce
          resources:
            requests:
              storage: 5Gi
      networking:
        hostNetwork: true
      config:
        jvmOptions:
          heapSize: 512M
      datacenters:
        - metadata:
            name: dc1
          size: 3
          resources:
            requests:
              memory: 1Gi

The complete list of fields in the k8ssandra: section is documented in the K8ssandraCluster documentation.

See the full MissionControlCluster manifest template.

Replace the <project-slug> placeholder with the namespace of the project where you want to create the cluster.
After saving this generated manifest to a file, create the cluster with the following command:
```
kubectl apply -f <manifest-filename>.yaml
```

In addition to the k8ssandra: section, the MissionControlCluster resource definition also contains settings which are specific to DataStax Mission Control:

yaml
apiVersion: missioncontrol.datastax.com/v1beta1
kind: MissionControlCluster
metadata:
  name: test
  namespace: <project-slug>
spec:
  k8ssandra:
    ...
  createIssuer: true
  encryption:
    internodeEncryption:
      enabled: true
      certs:
        createCerts: true
        certTemplate:
          ...

The createIssuer field, when true, enables DataStax Mission Control to manage the Transport Layer Security (TLS) issuer. Setting this field to false indicates the user must provision secrets (certificates) when utilizing TLS.
The encryption: section contains the settings for the internode encryption certificates. Internode encryption is enabled by default, and can be disabled by setting .spec.encryption.internodeEncryption.enabled to false. See detailed information in the internode encryption documentation.

Modify a cluster

You can modify a cluster by editing the cluster manifest and applying the changes with the kubectl apply command.

kubectl apply -f <manifest-filename>.yaml

Delete a cluster

Deleting a cluster is as simple as deleting the MissionControlCluster resource:

kubectl delete missioncontrolcluster <name> -n <project-slug>

Substitute the name of the MissionControlCluster resource in the <name> variable and the namespace of the chosen project for the <project-slug> variable.