We are now planning to launch a Cassandra cluster on AWS EC2. For the minimum, we plan to launch two nodes, each on a different availability zone (AZ) of the same region (us-east-1) to have better fault tolerance. But cross-AZ data transfer is $0.02 per GB AWS cross-az traffic. This brings me the question of how much data is transferred per month for nodes to communicate periodically (gossip), thus to estimate the cost associated. I just don't want to be caught up in surprise when the bill comes out.
Suppose there are only two nodes, each one in a different AZ, and suppose there is no client Read/Write at all (I know how to estimate that part), how much data will they transfer per month for gossip? When the cluster grows, how will it grow? Will it grow in O(N^2)?