Even with the best infrastructure, failures will occur without warning and are almost guaranteed. Building applications that can resist this fact of life can be both art and science. In this talk, I'll try to eliminate the art portion and focus more on the science. Starting at high level architecture decisions, I will take you through each layer and finally down to actual application code. Using Cassandra as the back end database, we can build layers of fault tolerance that will leave end users completely unaware of the underlying chaos that could be occurring. With a little planning, we can say goodbye to the Fail Whale and the fragility of the traditional RDBMS. Topics will include:

• Application strategies to utilize active-active, diverse, datacenters
• Replicating data with the highest integrity and maximum resilience
• Utilizing Cassandra's built-in fault tolerance
• Architecture of private, cloud or hybrid based applications
• Application driver techniques when using Cassandra