Understanding the Cassandra Architecture 8 About Internode Communications (Gossip) 8 About Cluster Membership and Seed Nodes 9 About Failure Detection and Recovery 9 About Data Partitioning in Cassandra older information is overwritten with the most current state for a particular node. About Cluster Membership and Seed Nodes When a node first starts up, it looks at its configuration file to determine the initiate gossip contact with failed nodes to see if they are back up. To permanently change a node's membership in a cluster, administrators must explicitly add or remove nodes from a Cassandra cluster using