When you start working with large, production-level clusters, having a good orchestration tool can save you a lot of work. After all, building and configuring a three-node cluster is one thing, but building and maintaining a 300 node cluster requires a different approach.
This comes into play when cluster-wide changes must be applied, such as a new SSL certificate or an upgrade to a new patch level. Manual methods, which are fine for the three-node cluster, quickly become untenable at a large scale.
For some Cassandra teams, a collection of Python or shell scripts will suffice for running some of the repeatable parts of their deployment process. But as scale increases and configurations change, this approach ...
