Since Cassandra is designed for significant scale, it follows that most applications using it would be designed with similar scalability in mind. One principle characteristic of high performance applications is that they do not block threads unnecessarily, and instead attempt to maximize available resources.
As previously discussed, one of the downsides to the older Thrift protocol was its lack of support for asynchronous requests. Fortunately, this situation has been remedied with the native driver, making the process of building scalable applications on top of Cassandra significantly easier.
Tip
Blocking on I/O, such as with calls to Cassandra, can cause significant bottlenecks in high-throughput applications. Since a slow application can be the same as a dead application, you should use the asynchronous API to avoid blocking whenever possible.
If you are familiar with the java.util.concurrent package, and the Future class specifically, the asynchronous API will...