Cassandra is a highly scalable distributed masterless NoSQL database. It values availability and partition tolerance over consistency. All nodes are equal and resilient. Cassandra uses consistent hashing to spread data uniformly and writes data immutably through log structured storage for easy scaling. It is not ACID compliant but offers tunable consistency levels. Compaction cleans up data and repair ensures cluster synchronization. CQL provides a SQL-like interface but Cassandra differs significantly from relational databases.