Cassandra: Facebook's Scalable Structured Storage System

Facebook engineers Avinash Lakshman and Prashant Malik developed Cassandra to address the scaling challenges of Inbox Search. This distributed storage system manages structured data across numerous commodity servers, ensuring high availability and no single point of failure. Cassandra employs consistent hashing and gossip protocols for data distribution and fault detection. Its data model is based on keys, column families, and dynamic columns/supercolumns, offering flexibility in data layout. Initially built for Inbox Search, Cassandra was open-sourced and is now used for various large-scale storage needs within and outside of Meta.