cloudkick | blog: 4 Months with Cassandra, a love story     At Cloudkick we track a ton of metrics about our customer's servers and it's quite a challenge to store such massive amounts of data. Early on, we made the decision to avoid using tools like RRDTool, so we could provide a more holistic look at infrastructure. We had two firm requirements: we wanted to show trends on a macro-level and to have very low latency so our users would never wait for graphs to build. We initially used PostgreSQL, but as we added billions of rows, the performance quickly degraded. We used cron jobs that would roll up the data on intervals to trade storage for throughput and lower latency. With clever partitioning, we were able to stretch the system to a certain point, but beyond that we faced issues of needing a much bigger machine and faster rotational disks to accommodate our business requirements; that's when started looking at other solutions.     https://www.cloudkick.com/blog/2010/mar/02/4_months_with_cas...     tags: cassandra hostmon cloudkick Cassandra Project     Cassandra is a highly scalable, eventually consistent, distributed, structured key-value store. Cassandra brings together the distributed systems technologies from Dynamo and the data model from Google's BigTable. Like Dynamo, Cassandra is eventually consistent. Like BigTable, Cassandra provides a ColumnFamily-based data model richer than typical key/value systems. Cassandra was open sourced by Facebook in 2008, where it was designed by one of the authors of Amazon's Dynamo. In a lot of ways you can think of Cassandra as Dynamo 2.0. Cassandra is in production use at Facebook but is still under heavy development.     http://incubator.apache.org/cassandra/     tags: amazon cassandra mapreduce distributed database