By now, you should have a solid understanding of Cassandra's approach to availability and why the fundamental design decisions were made. In the later chapters, we'll take a deeper look at the following ideas:

By the end of this book, you should possess a solid grasp of these concepts and be confident that you've successfully deployed one of the most robust and scalable database platforms available today.

However, we need to take it a step at a time, so in the next few chapters, we will build a deeper understanding of how Cassandra manages data. This foundation will be necessary for the topics covered later in the book. We'll start with a discussion of Cassandra's data placement strategy in the next chapter.