High Performance in a Few Clicks: Walkthrough

Hi everybody, my name is Attila Tóth, I’m a Developer Advocate with ScyllaDB, and in this video I will show you the most recent developments in the 1 million ops demo GitHub repository. We have added a user interface, so now it’s easier to set up ScyllaDB clusters for benchmarking, demos, and proof-of-concept purposes.

Let me show you how it works. With this new Demo UI application, which you need to run locally on your machine, you can spin up ScyllaDB clusters in the cloud in different environments, and then you can run different scenarios. As you can see, we currently have three demos available. In this video, as an example, we’re going to try ScyllaDB Enterprise on AWS. This option uses the ScyllaDB Enterprise version and AWS EC2 instances under the hood. The Demo UI is actually running Terraform and Ansible commands, so whenever you are running a plan or apply, for example, Terraform and Ansible commands are being executed.

Once you initialize the demo, you can set up your cluster and workload. To do this, you first need to choose the number of nodes in the cluster, and then you also need to select the machine type for each node. Then you can customize the workload. You can do this by adjusting the sliders: you can select the number of read and the number of write operations that you want to execute on this ScyllaDB cluster. You can increase or decrease the workload by changing the number of loader machines as well. For example, you can have just one loader machine, or you can have multiple loader machines that will run a workload against the ScyllaDB cluster.

When you’re happy with the settings, you can just click Plan. This runs a Terraform plan under the hood, and it allows you to review the changes before actually applying them. If everything looks good, you can click Apply. This will run Terraform apply, and it will deploy the cluster alongside ScyllaDB Monitoring and the loader machines. This may take some time depending on your configuration, but once the cluster is up and running, you will see Grafana dashboard tabs appear at the top. These dashboards are part of the ScyllaDB Monitoring Stack, and they allow you to monitor the cluster in real time.

Now that the demo is running, you can also make some changes. For example, we can double the load by increasing the number of loader machines. You can click Apply again, and once the process completes, you will see the increased workload on the Grafana dashboard.

When you’re done with your ScyllaDB demo, don’t forget to click Destroy. This will run Terraform destroy, and it will make sure to clean up all the resources that you have created. This way you can avoid unnecessary costs. Make sure that you wait until the process completes before closing the application.

The GitHub repository link is in the description, so make sure to go to that page and follow the README instructions to get started. Let us know if you have any feedback or if you have ideas on how we could improve the project. Thank you, and see you in the next one.