Robbie Strickland - Cassandra High Availability

Robbie Strickland got involved in the Apache Cassandra project in 2010, and he initially went into production with the 0.5 release. He has made numerous contributions over the years, including his work on drivers for C# and Scala, and multiple contributions to the core Cassandra codebase. In 2013, he became the very first certified Cassandra developer, and in 2014, DataStax selected him as an Apache Cassandra MVP.

While this is Robbie's first published technical book, he has been an active speaker and writer in the Cassandra community and is the founder of the Atlanta Cassandra Users Group. Other examples of his writing can be found on the DataStax blog, and he has conducted numerous webinars and spoken at many conferences over the years.

I would like to thank my wife for encouraging me to go forward with this project and for continuing to be supportive throughout the significant time commitment required to write a book. Also, I am truly appreciative of my excellent reviewers: Richard Low, Jimmy Mrdell, Rob Murphy, and Russell Spitzer. They helped keep me honest, and their deep expertise added materially to the quality of the content. I would also like to thank the entire staff at Packt Publishing who were involved in the book's publishing process. Lastly, I want to thank Logan Johnson who initially pointed me toward Cassandra. The risk has paid off, and Logan is responsible for starting me off on this path.

Richard Low has worked with Cassandra since Version 0.6 and has managed and supported some of the largest Cassandra deployments. He has contributed fixes and features to the project and has helped many users build their first Cassandra deployment. He is a regular speaker at Cassandra events and a contributor to Cassandra online forums.

Jimmy Mrdell is a senior software engineer and Cassandra contributor who has spent the last 4 years working with large distributed systems using Cassandra. Since 2013, he has been leading a database infrastructure team at Spotify, focusing on improving the Cassandra ecosystem at Spotify and empowering other teams to operate Cassandra clusters. Jimmy likes algorithms and competitive programming and won the programming competition Google Code Jam in 2003.

Rob Murphy is a solutions engineer at DataStax with more than 16 years of experience in the field of data-driven application development and design. Rob's background includes work with most RDMS platforms as well as DataStax/Apache Cassandra, Hadoop, MongoDB, Apache Accumulo, and Apache Spark. His passion for solving "data problems" goes beyond the system level to the data itself. Rob has a Master's degree in Predictive Analytics from Northwestern University with a specific research interest in machine learning and predictive algorithms at the "Internet scale".

Russell Spitzer received his PhD in Bioinformatics from UCSF in 2013, where he became increasingly interested in data analytics and distributed computation. He followed these interests and joined DataStax, the enterprise company behind the Apache Cassandra distributed database. At DataStax, he works on the testing and development of the integration between Cassandra and other groundbreaking open source technologies, such as Spark, Solr, and Hadoop.

I would like to thank my wife, Maggie, who put up with a lot of late-night laptop screen glow so that I could help out with this book.