Apache Cassandra paved the way for today's biggest digital platforms to scale into the much bigger global scene. Patrick McFadin of Datastax is one of the people involved in this open-source project and saw first-hand how it burst into the world. He joins Ben Rometsch to share how Cassandra was developed, the many challenges they faced in its optimization, its relationship with Datastax, and how it changed database engine creation and data modeling. Patrick also talks about the measures they are implementing to continuously improve Cassandra and limit open-source access to ensure quality.