Eiti Kimura Software Engineer at Movile
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Movile
Movile is the industry leader for development of mobile content and commerce platforms in Latin America. With products for mobile phones, smartphones and tablets, our work makes people’s lives better and a lot more fun.
For companies, Movile delivers complete products, integrating transactions in M-Commerce, M-Payments and content distribution, fast and with quality. Millions of people use Movile apps every day. To always enjoy the most practical, and reliable way, of paying through their mobile devices. Movile is shopping, and fun, on the go.
I’m a software architect at Movile, one of responsible for some of high distributed platforms using Cassandra technology.
 
Selecting NoSQL
The main motivation for choosing Cassandra was to evolve our platforms and make it more stable, available, and fast. Using pure and traditional relational databases solution was very hard to scale it up; besides the performance problems, as the data volume increases.
We evaluated some other solutions, like MongoDB, CoucheDB and Neo4J. Without a doubt, Cassandra was the technology that best fits to our needs – it is fast, scales very well, and is reliable. 
 
Billing, and subscription management systems
We are using Cassandra as our main users subscriptions repository, it holds our rules for billing and safety mechanisms. Today we have about 56.4 million subscriptions inside our cluster. We have 2 versions of Cassandra in our production environment right now, 1.0.6 and 1.1.12.
 
Deployment
We have the following setups:
– 1 DC with 4 nodes
– 2 DC`s with 5 nodes, planning to expand to 10 nodes
 
Words of wisdom
Try it, experiment, stress it and adapt it according to your needs. Create some test clusters with different configurations, try some different ways to access information, CQL, other drivers, etc.
Acquire knowledge on Cassandra architecture and how it works, how nodes communicate; it can help you to plan your cluster, check capacity requirements and use it.
Cassandra community
The community has a lot of people interested in talking, discussing and supporting Cassandra. It is helpful, and easy to find content and meetups. Overall, a very nice experience.