Cool. I look forward to the post that reveals the unique properties of Cassandra that ended up making it the most practical data store for your use case.
I understand that Cassandra et al exist to solve real problems that someone out there has experienced, and I seek to throw no shade on the great engineers who make these fine products. I am, however, somewhat dubious that these niche products are applicable in the vast majority of cases where they're deployed. I strongly believe, and I think the data would bare out on this, that when it gets down to brass tacks, most people are integrating such specialized tools into generic products to either a) make life at the office more exciting; b) beef up resume points for their next job application cycle; or c) both.
Someone in our company wrote a blog post pretending to justify the move to a niche datastore. He's very proud of it and makes several spurious, nonsensical justifications in it. The truth is that MySQL would've been many times more practical along all axes, except the one this guy cares most about, which involve his personal career ambitions.
This move was partially under the radar so objections couldn't be raised and full backups were not properly arranged. It cost the company a lot of money not only in time and infrastructure, but also in the recovery process that had to be undertaken by real data experts (or nearest we had at the time, at least) when the cluster was destroyed by one of his careless scripts. :)
Second nightmare, currently ongoing: shifting everything to docker/k8s, which, for just one example among a very long laundry list of complaints, only got support for directly addressing app servers behind a load balancer last month, as a beta feature (in k8s nomenclature, that's "Version 1.5 has a beta StatefulSets feature to make Pods in a ReplicaSet uniquely addressable from inside the cluster! Don't forget to make a Headless Service and Persistent Volume." Exhausted yet? Just wait.).
Why are we switching to something that lacks such basic functionality (we're like 3 versions behind, so we can't use it)? If I told you, I'd have to kill you, but it sure makes our resumes pretty.
I'm all for learning, experimentation, and doing things for fun. We are on Hacker News after all. I guess I've just developed a taste for a stable production ethos that, to co-opt a scriptural term, is not "blown about by every wind of [tech fad]". I crave a company that makes its decisions based on a significant and real cost-benefit analysis that shows substantial unique benefits and sufficient maturity to a tech before jumping on the bandwagon. I guess I just want some sanity.
As it stands, people just pretend that these justifications exist by making up some mumbo-jumbo about "dude JavaScript on the backend is like really event-driven, brah!"