About the Reviewers

William Berg has been engineering software for the last several years, and has worked with Cassandra all that time. He works mainly with Java. He has also reviewed Cassandra Design Patterns, another Packt Publishing title. He also plays the bass guitar and produces electronic music.

Mark Kerzner holds degrees in law, math, and computer science. He is a software architect and has been working with Big Data for the last 7 years. He is a cofounder of Elephant Scale, a Big Data training and implementation company, and is the author of FreeEed, an open-source platform for eDiscovery based on Apache Hadoop. He has many authored books and patents to his credit. He loves learning languages, and is currently perfecting his Hebrew and Chinese.

Alex Shvid is a Data Grid architect with more than 10 years of software experience in Fortune 500 companies with the focus on financial institutions. He has worked in the USA, Argentina, and Russia and has many architect and developer certifications, including those from Pivotal/Spring Source and Oracle. He is a regular speaker at user groups and conferences around the world such as the Java One and Cassandra meet ups. Alex works for PayPal in Silicon Valley, developing low-latency big data real-time solutions. His major specialization is in big data and fast data framework adoption for enterprise environments. He has participated in an open-source project Spring Data Cassandra module and developed a Dell Crowbar automation barclamp for Cassandra. Among his recent projects in Fast data are: integration of Gemfire from Pivotal as an event processing middleware solution and caching system for Gire (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Visa (Foster City, CA, USA), VMWare (Palo Alto, CA, USA) as well as the Coherence from Oracle for Analog (Boston, MA, USA), RCI (Parsippany, NJ, USA), and a custom data grid solution for Deutsche Bank (New York, NY, USA). When he is not working, Alex can usually be found hiking with his wife along the Coastal Trail in the San Francisco Bay Area