Originally built by Facebook in 2009, Apache Cassandra is a free and open-source distributed database designed to handle large amounts of data across a large number of servers.
Cassandra at Stream
At Stream, we use Cassandra as the primary data store for our feeds. Cassandra stands out because it’s able to:
- Shard data automatically
- Handle partial outages without data loss or downtime
- Scale (almost) linearly
If you’re already using Cassandra, your cluster is likely configured to handle the loss of 1 or 2 nodes. However, what happens when a full availability zone goes down?
Stream wrote a guest post for HighScalability that will teach you how to setup Cassandra to survive a full availability zone outage.