What is a "Cassandra cluster" defined as?

A "Cassandra cluster" is defined as a collection of nodes managing data together. In the context of Apache Cassandra, a cluster consists of multiple interconnected nodes that work together to ensure high availability and fault tolerance. Each node in the cluster stores a portion of the data, and they all communicate with each other to provide a single, unified view of the dataset. This distributed architecture is crucial for handling large volumes of data and for scaling horizontally by simply adding more nodes to the cluster as needed.

In a Cassandra cluster, data is partitioned across the nodes using a partitioning strategy, and the system is designed to handle node failures gracefully. This means even if one node goes down, the remaining nodes continue to operate, ensuring that the database remains accessible and the data is not lost. This design contrasts with simpler database setups where a single server might handle all the database management, thus lacking the redundancy and scalability that a cluster provides.