Explore strategies for reducing client latency and timeouts when running Cassandra on public cloud platforms in this informative conference talk. Delve into the challenges of operating Cassandra in cloud environments, where background maintenance activities can impact virtual machine performance. Learn about effective metrics for faster incident detection and how to implement actionable automation to improve recovery times. Discover how to leverage maintenance announcements, such as Microsoft Azure's Scheduled Events, to mitigate latency issues. Gain insights into best practices, including speculative execution, for optimizing client configurations to enhance performance, reduce latency, and achieve more predictable latency in cloud-based Cassandra deployments.