I have recently shrank the size of a Cassandra cluster from 24 m1.xlarge nodes to 6 hi1.4xlarge nodes in EC2 using Priam. The 6 nodes are significantly beefier than the nodes I started with and are handling much more work than 4 nodes combined. In this article I describe the process I went through to shrink the size of our cluster and replace the nodes with beefier ones without downtime by not swapping each node one at a time, but by creating an additional virtual region with beefier nodes and switching traffic to that.