Is Cassandra's manual node addition/removal tasks tedious and practical in a large cluster? I am evaluating using Cassandra as a large key-value store over about 500 commodity machines.  AFAIK, Cassandra requires manual intervention during permanent machine failures (removing the deadnode, adding new machines).  I would think that the machine failure rate is high enough to overload the administrator.  So is it practically feasible to run Cassandra in such a large cluster?

Thanks,
There are mentions of clusters with size 300-400 &amp; more machines.  But plenty of tools are provided with Cassandra that could help with automation of deployment process.  Plus you can find a plenty of recipes for Ansible (1, 2, ...), or some other automation frameworks.

More work could be required for other admin tasks, like, making sure that repairs are running, etc.  But people are doing it, and there are "3rd-party" tools for them as well.