independent nodes that are configured together into a cluster. In a Cassandra cluster, all nodes are peers, meaning there is no master node or centralized management process. A node joins a Cassandra cluster for a node. About Client Requests in Cassandra PropertyFileSnitch 19 All nodes in Cassandra are peers. A client read or write request can go to any node in the cluster. When a client connects to a node Instances page in your AWS EC2 Dashboard, select the node you want to connect to. Since all nodes are peers in Cassandra, you can connect using any node in the cluster. However, the first node is typically