Cassandra Summit Europe 2013

Odnoklassniki uses cassandra for its business data, which doesn't fit into RAM. This data is typically fast growing, frequently accessed by our users and must be always available, because it constitute our primary business as a social network. The way we use cassandra is somewhat unusual - we don't use thrift or netty based native protocol to communicate with cassandra nodes remotely. Instead, we co-locate cassandra nodes in the same JVM with business service logic, exposing not generic data manipulation, but business level interface remotely. This way, we avoid extra network roundtrips within a single business transaction and use internal calls to Cassandra classes to get information faster. Also, this helps us to create many small hacks on Cassandra's internals, making huge gains on efficiency and ease of distributed server development.