I have a cassandra cluster having 3 nodes with replication factor of 2. But what would happen if the entire cassandra cluster goes down at the same time. How read and write can be manage in this situation and what would be the best consistency level so that i can manage my cassandra nodes for high availability, As of now i'm using QUORUM.
1 Answers
If your cluster is down on all nodes - it is down.
When you need HA, think of deploying more than one datacenter, so availability can be maintained even when an entire datacenter/rack goes down.
If you can live with stale data, you could use CL.ONE instead - you need only one node to respond.
More replicas also increases availability for CL.QUORUM - you need RF/2+1 nodes from your replicas alive, in case of 2 -> 2/2+1 = 2 or all your replicas need to be online. With RF=3 you sill only need 2 as 3/2+1 = 2 - now you can have one node down.
As for your writes - all acknowleged writes will be written to disk in the commitlog (if there is no caching issue on your disks) and restored when coming back online. Of course there may be a race condition where the changes are written to disk but not acked via network.
Keep in mind to setup NTP!