While the material in this chapter is primarily focused on adding capacity to your cluster, there might be times when reducing capacity is what you're hoping to accomplish. There can be a number of valid reasons for doing this. Perhaps you experience smaller transaction volumes than originally anticipated for a new application, or you might change your data retention plan. In some cases you might want to move to a smaller cluster with more capable nodes, especially in cloud environments where this transition is made easier.

Regardless of your reasons for doing so, knowing how to remove nodes from your cluster will certainly come in handy at some point in your Cassandra experience. Let's take a look at this process now.