In this chapter we've discussed Cassandra's approach to availability and why the fundamental design decisions were made. The remainder of this book will build on this foundation. We will cover such topics as: how to configure Cassandra for high availability, design highly available applications on Cassandra, avoid common antipatterns, and handle various failure scenarios.
By the end of this book, you should possess a solid grasp of these concepts and be confident that you've successfully deployed one of the most robust and scalable database platforms available today.
However, we need to take it a step at a time, so in the next few chapters, we will build a deeper understanding of how Cassandra manages data. This foundation will be necessary for the topics covered later in the book. We'll start with a discussion of Cassandra's data placement strategy in the next chapter.
