question

[EDITED] The DataStax Cassandra Operator (cass-operator) has support for multi-datacenter clusters. You just need to create two CassandraDatacenter resources with the same clusterName in the spec section. But multi-region clusters are not supported in Kubernetes (at the time of writing). Allow me to explain it in detail.

Multiple Cassandra DCs

At the pure-Cassandra layer (setting aside Kubernetes for a minute), there are three minimum criteria required for C* nodes to be able to form a C* cluster:

• They must have the same C* cluster_name.
• They must have a common seed(s) in the seeds list.
• They must be able to gossip with each other (shared network segment).

The same rules apply when it comes to two datacenters -- same cluster name, have a common seed and network connectivity between the DCs:

Containerised DCs

The setting described above applies to Cassandra clusters deployed in a Kubernetes cluster. It does not matter that the Cassandra nodes are in Docker containers running in Kubernetes pods.

As long as they share the same cluster name, have a common seed and have network connectivity, the Cassandra DCs can be part of the same cluster.

The cass-operator supports multi-DC in a single Kubernetes cluster regardless of whether:

• Kubernetes worker nodes which host C* pods are in the same zone.
• Kubernetes worker nodes are in different zones in the same region.

In this diagram, Cassandra DC A and DC B could be in the same or different zones as long as they are in the same region:

The caveat for this configuration is that you need to ensure the control plane is configured for high availability. Otherwise, the control plane is a point-of-failure if it is only located in a single zone.

Multi-region deployments

In a configuration where Cassandra DCs are deployed in multiple regions shown in this diagram:

Cassandra will operate as long as the nodes share the same cluster name, have a common seed and have network connectivity (GKE VPC in your case).

But since each DC is managed by a separate operator in each region:

• Operator 1 can only manage the DC in region 1.
• Operator 2 can only manage the DC in region 2.

In simpler terms, the operators don't have anything to do with each other because it requires federation which is not supported in Kubernetes. To be clear, this isn't a limitation in the cass-operator but a functionality which is not supported by Kubernetes.

If you make a configuration change in region 1, that change will only be applied to that region by operator 1. Similarly changes in region 2 will only be applied in that region by operator 2 because Kubernetes does not support federated configurations across regions.

For more information, see the official Kubernetes Best Practices document on Running in multiple zones. Cheers!