Packt recently asked me to review their new publication Cassandra High Availability, written by Robbie Strickland.
I’ve worked with Cassandra in the past — early designs of Loggly‘s 2nd generation Log analytics platform used Cassandra as its authoritative store for log data, but we ended up pulling it and using elasticsearch as both the store and search engine.
The creator of the network monitoring system Riemann, Kyle Kingsbury, has put together a comprehensive series of blog posts, on the fault-tolerance, high-availability, and general correctness of number of database and storage technologies. Of the technologies discussed I am most familiar with — elasticsearch and Apache Kafka — I found the posts to be a great read.
If you haven’t read them yet, you should check them out on his site.
Cassandra is an open-source, distributed database, informally known as a NoSQL database. It is designed to store large amounts of data, offer high-write performance, and provide fault-tolerance. I recently needed some hands-on experience with Cassandra, and being relatively new to Java programming, needed a simple set-up with which I would experiment.