Friday, December 29, 2017

Apache Zeppelin as a Web Querying Interface for Cassandra

Hi!

An important thing that you are missing when starting to use Cassandra is a decent web tool
for executing CQL queries, and browsing the results.

Googling for a "Cassandra web ui" results in RazorSql, and some other not so promising engines, where most of them are not a web UI at all.


As you can tell, by the post's title, Apache Zeppelin turned out to be a great solution for our need.
It has a built in Cassandra Interpreter, which only requires basic connection properties.

Here is a video explaining all about Zeppelin and Cassandra 



We did had one issue with installing Zeppelin on our VPC, and trying to access it via Nginx and AWS load balancer:

  • Apache Zeppelin is using a web socket for a client-server connectivity. 
  • It requires special configuration on Nginx: how to configure Apache Zeppelin on Nginx
  • It enforced us to use Application Load Balancer, instead of Classic Load Balancer, which doesn't support web sockets out of the box. 

As a result, we no longer have to ssh Cassandra nodes, in order to execute CQL queries.

I hope that everyone who is looking for a CQL web ui, would find his answer here (or a better answer somewhere else :) ).

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