Streaming-First Architectures-Real Time and Event-Driven: Pragmatic Apps

Having the right Data at the right Time

Having the right data at the right time is essential for organizations that need to compete. Especially in today’s fast-moving and data-driven world!
Accordingly, software systems need to process data in (near) real time and provide a flexibility that allows to quickly integrate new systems and data sources.

A data stream is a continuous flow of data that comes from various systems. The difference to traditional batch processing is that streams can be processed immediately. This holds many benefits such as:

More up-to-date insights
Data can be processed faster and in turn speed up the way from data to value.
Enabling new use cases
Stream processing character enables new use cases like real time monitoring and other operational scenarios.
Increase flexibility in architectures
Building streaming-first architectures introduces a new way of thinking architectures which makes it easier to integrate various systems and thereby increase the flexibility.

What are Streaming Pipelines?

The most straight-forward way to implement a real time system is the use of a streaming pipeline that usually consists out of the following components:

Stream Sourcing
The source of a data stream can be any system from actual data source, like a sensor in a car, over more sophisticated edge processing components to batch-oriented systems, where streaming data can be extracted via change data capture.
Stream Transportation
Somehow the data has to be transported from one system to another. Here, the ways differ in their complexity from direct messaging up to more complex event broker or event logs.
Stream Processing
This is the part where the actual work happens. Data is transformed and processed with methods like complex event processing or other analytics tools. The results are then passed to other subsequent systems or constitute a new stream for another pipeline.

Want to learn more?

If you are interested in these topics, feel free to get in touch with us and request our White Paper "Streaming-First Architectures"

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