Masterless Architecture
True peer-to-peer distributed design with no single point of failure
Linear scalability with predictable performance
Seamless node addition without downtime
Decentralized request coordination
Automatic data distribution across the cluster
Location-aware cluster topology with configurable replica placement
Global Data Distribution
Multi-datacenter replication built into the core
Tunable consistency levels per operation
Geographic data locality for reduced latency
Cross-regional active-active deployment
Conflict resolution with latest-timestamp wins
Configurable replication factor per datacenter
High Availability
100% uptime architecture designed for always-on applications
No downtime during scaling operations
Automatic failover with no manual intervention
Self-healing data repair mechanisms
Online schema changes without blocking reads or writes
Rolling upgrades for zero downtime maintenance
Scalable Performance
Write-optimized storage engine for high throughput
Scales linearly to hundreds of nodes
Handles petabytes of data and thousands of operations per second
Tunable read/write consistency tradeoffs
Efficient range scans with order-preserving partitioners
Optimized data compaction strategies
Flexible Data Model
Wide-column store with schema flexibility
Support for complex nested data structures
Secondary indexes for flexible querying
Materialized views for query optimization
User-defined types for domain modeling
JSON support for semi-structured data
Enterprise Security
Role-based access control (RBAC)
Pluggable authentication with LDAP/Kerberos integration
TLS encryption for client and inter-node communication
Data encryption at rest
Audit logging for compliance requirements
Client-to-node and node-to-node encryption
Operational Simplicity
Built-in monitoring with JMX metrics
Nodetool utilities for cluster management
Incremental backups and snapshots
Configurable data compaction strategies
Tunable memory and disk space utilization
Repair service for background data consistency
Query Language
CQL (Cassandra Query Language) with SQL-like syntax
Prepared statements for optimized execution
Batch operations for atomic writes
Lightweight transactions for conditional updates
Time-to-live (TTL) for automatic data expiration
Configurable read timeout and consistency
Ecosystem Integration
Apache Spark connector for analytics
Kafka Connect for data streaming
Hadoop integration for batch processing
Presto and Trino connectors for SQL analytics
Grafana dashboards for visualization
Prometheus exporters for metrics