Apache Cassandra™: Four Interesting Facts

Apache Cassandra is a NoSQL database that has been adopted by leading organizations such as Instagram, GoDaddy, and Netflix due to its ability to meet the demands of modern applications which have surpassed the capabilities of traditional relational databases. Originally developed by Facebook engineers in 2007 to power the social network's inbox search feature using large datasets across multiple servers, Cassandra was released as an open source project in July 2008 and became an Apache Incubator project in January 2009. Today, major enterprises worldwide use it for building and deploying powerful applications in hybrid cloud environments. DataStax has been the driving force behind this open-source project, contributing to its growth and sophistication over the years. Cassandra's masterless architecture supports linear scalability for read and write operations, making it highly scalable. In 2014, Apple reported having a Cassandra instance with more than 75,000 nodes and storing over 10 petabytes of data. With the upcoming release of Cassandra 4.0, its adoption and capabilities are expected to continue growing in the coming years.