About the Author

Rajanarayanan Thottuvaikkatumana, "Raj", is a seasoned technologist with more than 23 years of software development experience at various multinational companies. He has lived and worked in India, Singapore, and the USA, and is presently based out of the UK. His experience includes architecting, designing, and developing software applications. He has worked on various technologies including major databases, application development platforms, web technologies, and big data technologies. Since 2000 onwards, he has been working mainly in Java-based technologies, and has been doing heavy-duty server-side programming in Java and Scala. He has worked on very highly concurrent, highly distributed, and high-transaction-volume systems with NoSQL data stores such as Cassandra and Riak and caching technologies such as Redis, Ehcache, and Chronicle Map. Raj has a lot of experience in integrating Cassandra with Spark and has shared the Scala code repository on GitHub.

Raj holds one master's degree in Mathematics and one master's degree in Computer Information Systems, and has many certifications in ITIL and Cloud Computing to his credit.

Apart from all this, Raj is a prolific corporate trainer on various technical subjects and has contributed to the Apache Cassandra project.

When not working with computers, Raj watches a lot of tennis and he is an avid listener of classical music.

Even though Raj has worked on many white papers and training materials, this is his first publication in the form of a book.