So I have an application that will be very dormant most of the time but will need high-bursting a few days out of the month. Since we are deploying on EC2 I would like to keep only one Cassandra server up most of the time and then on burst days I want to bring one more server up (with more RAM and CPU than the first) to help serve the load. What is the best way to do this? Should I take a different approach?

Some notes about what I plan to do:

• Bring the node up and repair it immediately
• After the burst time is over decommission the powerful node
• Use the always-on server as the seed node

My main question is how to get the nodes to share all the data since I want a replication factor of 2 (so both nodes have all the data) but that won't work while there is only one server. Should I bring up 2 extra servers instead of just one?