Case Study: The Weather Channel achieves always-on, billion-request scale with DataStax

Rain Or Shine, The Weather Channel is Always-on Thanks to Cassandra

The Weather Channel, a global, always-on digital media leader that has delivered weather information since 1982, needed a scalable transactional database to support new capabilities like system performance tracking and a content generation system while serving billions of users. Relational databases could not handle the massive volumes and variety of structured and unstructured data or guarantee continuous availability—downtime would mean lost revenue, credibility, and missed critical notifications.

The Weather Channel adopted Apache Cassandra’s masterless architecture to provide linear scale, fault tolerance, and flexible data storage. Cassandra powers cached data mashups and consolidated messaging, letting TWC grow from 3 to 36 nodes across three regions, process billions of requests per month (about 100 million transactions per day, peaking near 180–200M), and roll out innovations such as social weather while maintaining continuous availability.

The Weather Channel

Robbie Strickland

Software Development Manager