How to Setup a Highly Available Multi-AZ Cassandra Cluster on AWS EC2

Apache Cassandra, originally developed by Facebook in 2009, is a free and open-source distributed database designed to manage large volumes of data across numerous servers. At Stream, Cassandra is utilized as the primary data store for handling feeds due to its ability to automatically shard data, manage partial outages without data loss or downtime, and scale almost linearly. Typically, Cassandra clusters are configured to withstand the loss of one or two nodes, but Stream has contributed a guest post on HighScalability detailing how to configure Cassandra to survive a complete availability zone outage.