Cassandra is one of the purest distributed systems, where the nodes are the same. Adding a new node is just a matter of launching a Cassandra service with almost the same parameters as any other machine in the ring. In a cloud environment, such as AWS, it is a pretty common practice to have a machine image of Cassandra that contains the blueprint of a Cassandra node. Each time you have to add a node to the cluster, you launch the Amazon Machine Image, tweak a couple of parameters that are specific to the node, and done. It is as simple as that.

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