Cassandra Modeling for Real-Time Analytics

There is much discussion these days about Lambda Architecture and its benefits for developing high performance analytic architectures. It offers a combination of a high performance, low latency ETL with a real-time layer, and a slower, more accurate, and flexible solution that runs in batch. As I work with it, I have learned to appreciate Cassandra's relative "immortality" and fit for such analytic systems. In a complex distributed system it's nice to know you have one component that you can rely on without much tending. Need to be highly available and regionally distributed?