Cassandra seed nodes and clients connecting to nodes
I'm a little confused about Cassandra seed nodes and how clients are meant to connect to the cluster. I can't seem to find this bit of information in the documentation.
Do the clients only contain a list of the seed node and each node delegates a new host for the client to connect to? Are seed nodes only really for node to node discovery, rather than a special node for clients?
Should each client use a small sample of random nodes in the DC to connect to?
Or, should each client use all the nodes in the DC?
Answer
Answering my own question:
Seeds
From the FAQ:
Seeds are used during startup to discover the cluster.
Also from the DataStax documentation on "Gossip":
The seed node designation has no purpose other than bootstrapping the gossip process for new nodes joining the cluster. Seed nodes are not a single point of failure, nor do they have any other special purpose in cluster operations beyond the bootstrapping of nodes.
From these details it seems that a seed is nothing special to clients.
Clients
From the DataStax documentation on client requests:
All nodes in Cassandra are peers. A client read or write request can go to any node in the cluster. When a client connects to a node and issues a read or write request, that node serves as the coordinator for that particular client operation.
The job of the coordinator is to act as a proxy between the client application and the nodes (or replicas) that own the data being requested. The coordinator determines which nodes in the ring should get the request based on the cluster configured partitioner and replica placement strategy.
I gather that the pool of nodes that a client connects to can just be a handful of (random?) nodes in the DC to allow for potential failures.