In Facebook laboratories, although not visible to the public, new software is developed, for example, the junction between two concepts involving the development departments of Google and Amazon. In short, Cassandra is defined as a distributed database. From the start, the authors undertook the task of creating a scalable database massively decentralized, optimized for read operations when possible, painlessly modifying data structures, and , for all this, not difficult to manage. The solution was found by combining two existing technologies: Google's BigTable and Amazon's Dynamo. One of the two authors, A. Lakshman, had earlier worked on BigTable and he borrowed the data model layout, while Dynamo contributed with the overall distributed architecture.
Cassandra is written in Java and for good performance it requires the latest possible JDK version. In Cassandra 1.0, they used another open source project Thrift for client access, which also came from Facebook...
