Those nodes are not in the peers table(s) because you told them NOT to join the ring with `join_ring=false` so it is working by design.
I'm not really sure what you're trying to achieve but if you want to separate the coordinator functions from the storage then what you probably want is to deploy Stargate nodes <https://stargate.io/>. Stargate is a data API gateway that sits between the app instances and the Cassandra database. It decouples client request coordination from the storage aspects of C*. It also allows you to perform CRUD operations against C* using APIs -- REST, JSON, gRPC, GraphQL. See the docs on Using the Stargate CQL API <https://stargate.io/docs/latest/develop/dev-with-cql.html> for details on how to set up Stargate nodes as coordinators for your C* database. If you want to see it in action, you can try it free on Astra DB <https://astra.datastax.com/> (Cassandra-as-a-service). Cheers! >