We're using Databricks as our provider for Spark execution, and we've been struggling to get the Spark Cassandra connector to work outside of the local development environment. The connector was attempting to connect to 127.0.0.1 even though we were passing the new host information into the getOrCreate(..) call. After working with Ganesh at Databricks support, we figured it out. The realization is that in Databricks, calls to getOrCreate() from a fat jar don't create a new SparkContext object. Thus, the configuration passed in gets ignored. If you want to update the Cassandra host information for the connector, you must update it after the call to getOrCreate() instead. Add the configuration directly to the context and you'll be good to go!