What is Cassandra and why Cassandra?

Cassandra is a fully distributed, masterless database, offering superior scalability, and fault tolerance to traditional single-master databases. Compared with other popular distributed databases such as Riak, HBase, and Voldemort, Cassandra offers a uniquely robust and expressive interface for modeling and querying data. What follows is an overview of several desirable database capabilities, with accompanying discussions of what Cassandra has to offer in each category. Apart from the following features, Apache Cassandra has a large user base including some top technology firms such as Apple, Netflix, and Instagram, who also open-source new features. It is being actively developed and has one of largest open source communities with close to 200 contributors and over 20,000 commits.