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, he has been working mainly in Java related technologies, and does heavy-duty server-side programming in Java and Scala. He has worked on very highly concurrent, highly distributed, and high transaction volume systems. Currently he is building a next generation Hadoop YARN-based data processing platform and an application suite built with Spark using Scala. Raj holds one master's degree in Mathematics, one master's degree in Computer Information Systems and has many certifications in ITIL and cloud computing to his credit. Raj is the author of Cassandra Design Patterns - Second Edition, published by Packt. When not working on the assignments his day job demands, Raj is an avid listener to classical music and watches a lot of tennis.