And yep, Cassandra is pretty similar to DynamoDB. Both are wide-column data stores. Some of the original folks that worked on Dynamo (not DynamoDB) at Amazon.com went to Facebook and worked on Cassandra. The concepts underlying Dynamo because the basis for DynamoDB at AWS.
For more background on Dynamo, check out The Dynamo Paper: https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/files/amazon-dynamo-sos...