For some reason there has been a disproportionately high number of news items on Cassandra lately. Some of those are included below, but also included are some other interesting updates which you might have missed.

Rackspace and Drizzle: Its time to rethink everything
Haproxy 1.4 – Now supports mysql health checks – This is a big deal [...]

Few weeks ago while I was mulling over what kind of service registry/discovery system to use for a scalable application deployment platform, I realized that for mid-size organizations with complex set of services, building one from scratch may be the only option.
I also found out that many AWS/EC2 customers have already been using S3 and [...]

This is a very interesting talk by Jonathan Ellis on database scalability. He designed and implemented multi-petabyte storage for Mozy and is currently the project chair for Apache Cassandra.

What every developer should know about database scalability, PyCon 2010
View more presentations from jbellis.

Scalability is not improving latency, but increasing throughput
But overall performance shouldn’t degrade
Throw [...]

Cassandra is the only NOSQL datastore I’m aware of, which is scalable, distributed, self replicating, eventually consistent, schema-less key-value store running on java which doesn’t have a single point of failure. HBase could also match most of these requirements, but Cassandra is easier to manage due to its tiny footprint.
The one thing Cassandra doesn’t do [...]