Database Reference
In-Depth Information
▪ Digg uses it for its primary near-time data store.
▪ Rackspace uses it for its cloud service, monitoring, and logging.
▪ Reddit uses it as a persistent cache.
▪ Cloudkick uses it for monitoring statistics and analytics.
▪ Ooyala uses it to store and serve near real-time video analytics data.
▪ SimpleGeo uses it as the main data store for its real-time location infrastructure.
▪ Onespot uses it for a subset of its main data store.
Cassandra is also being used by Cisco and Platform64, and is starting to see use at Comcast and
bee.tv for personalized television streaming to the Web and to mobile devices. There are others.
The bottom line is that the uses are real. A wide variety of companies are finding use cases for
Cassandra and seeing success with it. As of this writing, the largest known Cassandra installation
is at Facebook, where they have more than 150TB of data on more than 100 machines.
Many more companies are currently evaluating Cassandra for production use in different pro-
jects, and a services company called Riptano, cofounded by Jonathan Ellis, the Apache Project
Chair for Cassandra, was started in April of 2010. As more features are added and better tooling
and support options are rolled out, anticipate even broader adoption.
Summary
In this chapter, we've taken an introductory look at Cassandra's defining characteristics, history,
and major features. We have seen which major companies are using it and what they're using it
for. We also examined a bit of history of the evolution of important contributions to the database
field in order to gain a historical view of Cassandra's value proposition.
