Apache Cassandra is an open source, distributed database management system designed to handle large amounts of data across commodity servers. It provides high availability with no single point of failure, linear scalability and performance. Cassandra uses a decentralized architecture with no single point of failure, asynchronous masterless replication, column-oriented storage, and tunable consistency. It was developed by Avinash Lakshman and Prashant Malik at Facebook to power the Facebook inbox search feature.