At StampedeCon 2014, Nate McCall (The Last Pickle) presented "A Picture of Cassandra in the Real World." In this presentation, we’ll look past the media and marketing hype surrounding Cassandra to provide useful information taken directly from a number of real world use cases. We’ll discuss: systems architectures and methods of deployment performance characteristics of common workloads operations tasks required for keeping clusters healthy solutions to backup and recovery how to fit Cassandra into common software development processes Presented by a long-time Cassandra user and community member who led the development of the original Java driver back in the fall of 2009, this talk will be thorough, accurate, and informative. Attendees will come away with a better understanding of how to best leverage the power and operational characteristics of Cassandra in their architectures.