Cassandra – A structured storage system on a P2P Network

This post introduces Cassandra, a distributed storage system designed for massive scale and high availability. It details Cassandra's data model (key-value, column families, supercolumns, columns with timestamps) and its distributed properties, including consistent hashing for data distribution and range scans, gossip-style membership, and accrual-style failure detection for cluster management. It highlights replication for high availability, eventual consistency, and incremental scalability through node addition/removal. The post also mentions its initial deployment for Inbox Search at Facebook, storing TBs of data across hundreds of cores and terabytes of disk space, and its open-sourcing.