Apache Cassandra project Chair Jonathan Ellis talks about the Dynamo–BigTable hybrid. From its origins at Facebook to the creation of support company DataStax (known as Riptano at the time). He also details the design tradeoffs, internals as well as his take on high-profile Cassandra deployment stories.

The wiki page referenced at multiple points in the interview is here. The other recommended sources were this post by Max Grinev and this post by Arin Sarkissian