Introducing cstar: The Spotify Cassandra orchestration tool, now open source

This post introduces cstar, a new open-source tool for orchestrating operations on large Cassandra clusters. It details the challenges of manual operations, the limitations of existing tools like Ansible and Fabric for Cassandra's topology, and presents cstar's features: topology-aware execution (ONE, TOPOLOGY, ALL), job control (pause/resume), and safe parallelization based on replication factors. The tool is built on paramiko for SSH and infers topology from a seed node.