At this point, you should have a strong grasp of Cassandra's data distribution architecture, including consistent hashing, tokens, vnodes, and partitioners, as well as some of the causes of data hotspots. Your understanding of these fundamentals will help you to make sound design decisions that enable you to scale your cluster effectively and get the most out of your infrastructure investment.

In this chapter and the previous one, we made reference to replication and its related concepts a number of times. In the next chapter, we'll discuss replication in depth as replication is very important in determining the availability of data.