Apache Cassandra, originally developed at Facebook for inbox search and open-sourced in 2008, is a highly scalable and fault-tolerant distributed column-oriented database designed for high availability and no single point of failure. Its architecture is based on Amazon's Dynamo and Google's Bigtable, featuring a masterless design that allows all nodes to operate equally while efficiently managing large volumes of structured data. Cassandra supports various data formats and provides functionalities like fast writes, flexible data distribution, and tunable consistency, making it suitable for applications in messaging, IoT, retail, and social media analytics.