Cassandra & Its Purpose

Cassandra is a free distributed storage system developed for handling an enormous amount of data spread out across many nodes in a cluster. Cassandra helps to maintain the reliability and scalability of software systems by running on top of an infrastructure of hundreds of nodes managing persistent state in case of inevitable failures. It’s a highly available service in which the fault tolerance treatment is a norm rather than an exception with no single point of failure.

Cassandra provides an easy replication over many nodes using robust APIs capable of handling a vast amount of data in fault-tolerant nature. While maintaining the read efficiency, Cassandra design allows running on a cheap commodity server and can handle many write requests.

Context

Being a large social networking site, Facebook deals with billions of requests from users around the world, with the help of thousands of servers geographically spread over. To handle them, it requires certain performance elements such as scalability, reliability & efficiency. Besides such a huge infrastructure, there is always a risk of any servers going down. There is a need for a reliable and scalable system.

#design-analysis #cassandra #data analysis