add convenience method for authenticating with astra via db_id and token

[jbellis]

example usage:

from cassandra.cluster import Cluster

cloud_config = {
    'db_id': '04ab96df-...',
    'token': 'AstraCS:...'
    }
cluster = Cluster(cloud=cloud_config)

[msmygit]

Since each region within a given Astra DB cluster has its own SCB, how do we handle a multi-region scenario here?

[jbellis]

If you have a good solution, I can give it a try. Otherwise I'm happy for this to be a single region option.

[msmygit]

If you have a good solution, I can give it a try. Otherwise I'm happy for this to be a single region option.

Hi @jbellis please review the patch that I've submitted here to your fork, jbellis#1

The signature when specifying the region identifier will now be:

from cassandra.cluster import Cluster

cloud_config = {
    'db_id': '04ab96df-...',
    'token': 'AstraCS:...',
    'db_region': 'us-east4'
    }
cluster = Cluster(cloud=cloud_config)

and if the region identifier is not provided, the signature will be as follows and we will just return the SCB URL for the primary region (will work for single-region scenario too),

from cassandra.cluster import Cluster

cloud_config = {
    'db_id': '04ab96df-...',
    'token': 'AstraCS:...'
    }
cluster = Cluster(cloud=cloud_config)

and this work both for single- as well as multi-region Astra DB clusters. Let me know WDYT? Thank you in advance!

[absurdfarce]

We've had discussions about adding automatic download of the SCB into the drivers as an option in the past and in the end the decision has always been not to do so. That API has changed underneath us in the past IIRC but far more importantly it makes the DevOps API outages production-level issues for lots of clients... and DBPE has expressed some reservation about elevating that API to that status.

@joao-r-reis I know you and I have had these discussions in the past. Did I misrepresent/get anything wrong in the description above?

[jbellis]

We need some kind of solution here, the number of manual clicks required to download the scb is way beyond "I have better things to do with my time" for most devs. Especially now that the Astra UI prioritizes data API so hard.

[jbellis]

That API has changed underneath us in the past IIRC

It's a public, documented API. I think this is a non issue now. https://docs.datastax.com/en/astra-api-docs/_attachments/devops-api/index.html#tag/Database-Operations/operation/listDatacenters

[phact]

but far more importantly it makes the DevOps API outages production-level issues for lots of clients...

would caching it on disk alleviate your concern @absurdfarce

[absurdfarce]

It doesn't @phact. The API stability concerns are definitely a second-tier issue. The much larger issue for me is that we have spoken with ProdEng about this specific change and been told that we don't know that the relevant APIs/downloads were something that should be exposed for broad public use at the rates we'd expect from wide deployment of the drivers.

Even if that were no longer the case I wouldn't want to address this as a one-off for a single driver. I'd prefer to see a proposal to fix this handled as part of our product planning process so that we can deploy it uniformly to all drivers in a way that keeps the interface reasonably consistent. I'll raise this with our product folks so that they're aware of it.

[msmygit]

I also just realized we have this https://github.com/mieslep/cassandra-connector/blob/main/cassandra_connector/cassandra_connector.py#L38 which could be improvized outside of the python driver itself to just accept the DB ID (as opposed to the endpoint as is being currently available here).