It would have been difficult for me to complete this book without the support of a large number of people.

First, I would like to thank the people at BrightContext (http://www.brightcontext.com) for giving me the opportunity to do a lot of experiments with distributed computing and cloud infrastructure, and especially Leo Scott, Arunn Rajagopalan, and Steven Fusco for their technical suggestions.

A lot of credit goes to the online resources that helped me learn about the various technologies in this book. In the context of this book, I would like to acknowledge the people at Cassandra's mailing list, Jonathan Ellis and Christian Hasker of DataStax (http://www.datastax.com/), Aaron Morton of The Last Pickle (http://thelastpickle.com/about.html), Julian Browne (http://www.julianbrowne.com/) for one of the most excellent articles on the CAP theorem, Dave Gardner (http://www.davegardner.me.uk/), and DataStax for their exhaustive documentation.

On a more personal note, my siblings Rashmi, Deepshikha, and Rajat have provided invaluable support during the writing process, tolerating my highs and lows as I put together the final draft on top of an already busy schedule. Thanks to my friends Nihar and Tauseef, who kept me motivated, and thanks to my nieces Pariwa and Kittoo, without whom this book would have been completed a month earlier, but with a lot less fun. Lastly, thanks to my parents for their inspiration.

I'd like to express my gratitude to everyone at Packt Publishing involved in development and production of this book. I'd like to thank Anugya Khurana for keeping me on my toes to make sure things happen as they were scheduled, Anila Vincent, Peter Larsson, and Paul Weinstein for patiently going through the first draft and providing valuable feedbacks.

I am indebted to the FOSS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_software) community for providing excellent tools that are at par with their commercial counterparts. Cassandra is one of the greatest examples of the success of open source. Until the final draft, this book was written using only free and open source software such as Ubuntu, LibreOffice Writer, LibreOffice Draw, Git, VIM, Cassandra, PyCassa, Hadoop, Nagios, and others.