Get in the Ring with Cassandra and EC2

This series of posts provides advice on choosing the right Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances for hosting Cassandra on Amazon Web Services (AWS). It covers selecting instance types, scaling out your cluster, using an Amazon Machine Image (AMI), handling disaster planning and recovery, and best practices. The recommended minimum node size is m1.large, with larger nodes like m1.xlarge or i2.2xlarge for more data and lower latencies. Scaling horizontally on commodity machines is preferred over scaling upwards due to Cassandra's fault-tolerance and linear scalability. The article also discusses testing methods to estimate cluster throughput and the uncertainty of Cassandra's infinite scalability, but its linear scalability has been confirmed for clusters between 100 and 1,000 nodes.