In this chapter, we introduced the foundational concepts of replication and consistency. In our discussion, we outlined the importance of the relationship between replication factor and consistency level, and their impact on performance, data consistency, and availability.

By now, you should be able to make sound decisions specific to your use cases. This chapter might serve as a handy reference in the future as it can be challenging to keep all these details in mind.

In the previous two chapters, we've been gradually expanding from how Cassandra locates individual pieces of data to its strategy to replicate it and keep it consistent.

In the next chapter, we'll take things a step further and take a look at its multiple data center capabilities, as no highly available system is truly complete without the ability to distribute itself geographically.