Gossip Protocol features

Question

What does Gossip Protocol do in Cassandra?

Answer 1

Gossip Protocol in Cassandra is a peer-to-peer communication protocol in which nodes can choose among themselves with whom they want to exchange their state information. The nodes exchange information about themselves and about the other nodes that they have gossiped about, so all nodes quickly learn about all other nodes in the cluster.

The process of Acknowledging messages helps in failure detection. When a node is down/failing it is unable to send or receive messages and hence the Acknowledgements are not received.