Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 2
Designing Real-Time Streaming Architectures
By their nature, real-time architectures are layered systems that rely on
several loosely coupled systems to achieve their goals. There are a variety
of reasons for this structure, from maintaining the high availability of the
system in an unreliable world to service requirements and managing the cost
structure of the architecture itself.
The remainder of the first section of this topic introduces software,
frameworks and methods for dealing with the various elements of these
architectures. This chapter serves as the blueprint and foundation for the
architecture. First, the various components of the architecture are
introduced. These usually, but not always, correspond to separate machine
instances(physicalorvirtual).Afterthesecomponentshavebeenintroduced,
they can be discussed in the context of the primary features of a real-time
architecture: high availability, low latency, and horizontal scalability.
This chapter also spends some time discussing the languages used to build
real-time architectures. It is assumed that the reader will have some
familiarity with the languages used for the examples in this topic: Java and
JavaScript. Many of the software packages in this topic are implemented
using the Java Virtual Machine, though not necessarily Java itself.
JavaScript, of course, is the lingua franca of the web and is used extensively
in the later sections of this topic to implement the interfaces to the data.
Finally, this chapter offers some advice to someone planning a streaming
architecture pilot project. Many of the software packages in this topic can be
considered interchangeable in the sense that they can all be made to function
in any environment, but they all have their strengths and weaknesses. Based
on real-world experience, this naturally means that some packages are easier
to use in some environments than others. The final section of this chapter
provides some insight into solutions that have worked in the past and can
serve as a starting point for the future.
