Cassandra Medusa is a production-grade backup and restore tool for Apache Cassandra and DSE, designed to operate at cluster scale. It supports full and differential backups, with storage backends for local filesystems, S3-compatible object stores, Google Cloud Storage, Azure Blob Storage, and IBM Cloud. The tool operates in two modes: a CLI that orchestrates backups across nodes via parallel SSH (pssh), and a gRPC service for Kubernetes sidecar deployments. Backups are stored as indexed blobs (token maps, manifests, schemas) in the chosen storage, with configurable retention and purge policies. It also provides integrity verification (MD5 checksums), monitoring integration (DogStatsD), and snapshot management via nodetool, Jolokia, or the DSE Management API. The architecture is modular: storage backends inherit from an abstract async base class, snapshot creation is abstracted via a service factory, and monitoring is pluggable. Configuration is loaded from INI files, environment variables, and Kubernetes secrets. The codebase uses asyncio for concurrent uploads/downloads with configurable concurrency, tenacity for retry logic, and protocol buffers for the gRPC interface. While primarily an operational tool, its design patterns (abstract storage, factory-based snapshot services, monitoring abstractions) are cleanly separated and could serve as a reference for similar infrastructure tools. Medusa is actively maintained with frequent releases, a comprehensive test suite (unit + integration behave tests), and support for Python 3.10–3.12. The codebase demonstrates solid engineering practices: strong typing (namedtuples), separation of concerns, and minimal framework boilerplate. The integration tests cover multiple storage providers, encryption modes, and cluster topologies, providing high confidence in production readiness.