Cassandra Architecture: Understanding, Scaling and Optimizing - Ben Bromhead
Channel: All Things Open
Date: 2020-11-21

Presented by: Ben Bromhead, Instaclustr
Presented at All Things Open 2020 - Databases Track

Abstract: Apache Cassandra is built to support the high availability, scalability, and performance requirements of enterprise applications. Understanding its architecture can be tricky – this extended session tells you what you need to know.

The architecture of the open source Cassandra database is designed to provide uniquely simple and powerful scalability – ideal for applications utilizing the cloud, big data, and other data-intensive use cases. With Cassandra, adding capacity is a matter of adding additional nodes to existing clusters, which can be done while the cluster is active. This architecture can capably serve millions of users concurrently, and handle massive quantities of operations or data loads with impressive alacrity and performance. This is true even when operating Cassandra across multiple data centers or even multiple clouds. Cassandra’s architecture also avoids including any single point of failure – an advantage over sharded or master-slave architectures – to achieve the continuous availability and uptime crucial to many applications.

While the benefits of the database are clear and proven, properly scaling and optimizing Cassandra requires a healthy knowledge of its underlying architecture. Attendees will come away from this tutorial understanding of:

- The key components and concepts of Cassandra architecture, including data partitioning, data replication, consistent hashing, etc.
- Cassandra write process
- Cassandra read process
- Cassandra network topology
- How Cassandra architecture tolerates failure scenarios