The Apache Cassandra database is the right choice when you need scalability in terms of millions to billions of rows with the highest availability, such as 99.99 percent availability of characteristics, without compromising on performance. Cassandra's support for replicating across multiple datacenters is the best in the industry.
Cassandra for DevOps provides comprehensive information on the architecture, installation, monitoring, performance tuning, and configuring Apache Cassandra. You will learn how to address performance and scalability problems and about the tools that can be used for day-to-day administration tasks. Managing a huge amount of data requires a lot of optimization in choosing what to monitor and other management tasks. The simplest administrative tasks can take up a lot of your time; understanding how Cassandra works is the key to spending your time and energy on the right things and making sure you monitor the cluster properly.
Chapter 1, Basic Concepts and Architecture, starts by explaining the history and challenges of Big Data and the reason for Cassandra's existence. This chapter explains a bit about the CAP theorem and BigTable concepts.
Chapter 2, Installing Cassandra, talks about the hardware choices based on your traffic patterns and YAML configurations. It also talks about EC2 hardware choices as well as and keyspace and column family configurations, including the various options available.
Chapter 3, Inserting and Manipulating Data, explains about data modeling. It also talks about creating, altering, and querying data and tracing the query in a column family.
Chapter 4, Administration and Large Deployments, talks about basic administrative tasks, the tools to make data consistent (HH and Repairs), events that can hurt performance, and the ways to reduce the impact.
Chapter 5, Performance Tuning, talks a little bit about things to look out for and tuning for better performance, because the hardest part of running a Java app is getting the right GC settings and dealing with GC pauses. It also talks about request tracing to look for bottlenecks as well as tools to monitor Cassandra.
Chapter 6, Analytics, talks about Hadoop integration and segregating traffic for different work loads.
Chapter 7, Security and Troubleshooting, talks about the various security methods that can be implemented to secure the data in flight and at rest.
Bonus Chapter, Evolving Apps and Use Cases, talks about the various evolving apps and use cases and their tradeoffs. This chapter tries to provide you with information so that you can understand the pitfalls. This chapter can be found online at https://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/bonus_chapter.pdf.