After reading this chapter and the previous one, you should have a solid understanding of how Cassandra ensures that your data is available when required and protected from loss due to node or data center failure. By now, you should be able to set up and configure a cluster across multiple geographical regions, and be familiar enough with data centers to begin the journey to analyze your live data without cumbersome and expensive ETL processes.

So far we've focused on what it takes to get started with a solid Cassandra foundation for your application. In the next chapter, we will talk about what it looks like when your use case grows beyond your original plan and you need to scale out your cluster.