"stream processing" entries

Building systems for massive scale data applications

The O’Reilly Data Show podcast: Tyler Akidau on the evolution of systems for bounded and unbounded data processing.

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Many of the open source systems and projects we’ve come to love — including Hadoop and HBase — were inspired by systems used internally within Google. These systems were described in papers and implemented by people who needed frameworks that could comfortably scale to massive data sets.

Google engineers and scientists continue to publish interesting papers, and these days some of the big data systems they describe in publications are available on their cloud platform.

In this episode of the O’Reilly Data Show, I sat down with Tyler Akidau one of the lead engineers in Google’s streaming and Dataflow technologies. He recently wrote an extremely popular article that provided a framework for how to think about bounded and unbounded data processing (a follow-up article is due out soon). We talked about the evolution of stream processing, the challenges of building systems that scale to massive data sets, and the recent surge in interest in all things real time:

On the need for MillWheel: A new stream processing engine

At the time [that MillWheel was built], there was, as far as I know, literally nothing externally that could handle the scale that we needed to handle. A lot of the existing streaming systems didn’t focus on out-of-order processing, which was a big deal for us internally. Also we really wanted to hit a strong focus on consistency — being able to get absolutely correct answers. … All three of these things were lacking in at least some area in [the systems we examined].

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Real-time analytics within the transaction

Integrated data stream platforms are poised to supplant the lambda architecture.

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Data generation is growing exponentially, as is the demand for real-time analytics over fast input data. Traditional approaches to analyzing data in batch mode overcome the computational problems of data volume by scaling horizontally using a distributed system like Apache Hadoop. However, this solution is not feasible for analyzing large data streams in real time due to the scheduling I/O overhead it introduces.

Two main problems occur when batch processing is applied to stream or fast data. First, by the time the analysis is complete, it may already have been outdated by new incoming data. Second, the data may be arriving so fast that it is not feasible to store and batch-process them later, so the data must be processed or summarized when it is received. The Square Kilometer Array (SKA) radio telescope is a good public example of a system in which data must be preprocessed before storage. The SKA is a distributed radio observation project where each base station will receive 10-30 TB/sec and the Central Unit will process 4PB/sec. In this scenario, online summaries of the input data must be computed in real time and then processed — and significantly reduced in size — data is what’s stored.

In the business world, common examples of stream data are sensor networks, Twitter, Internet traffic, logs, financial tickers, click streams, and online bids. Algorithmic solutions enable the computation of summaries, frequency (heavy hitter) and event detection, and other statistical calculations on the stream as a whole or detection of outliers within it.

But what if you need to perform transaction-level analysis — scans across different dimensions of the data set, for example — as well as store the streamed data for fast lookup and retrospective analysis? Read more…

Building big data systems in academia and industry

The O'Reilly Data Show Podcast: Mikio Braun on stream processing, academic research, and training.

Mikio Braun is a machine learning researcher who also enjoys software engineering. We first met when he co-founded a real-time analytics company called streamdrill. Since then, I’ve always had great conversations with him on many topics in the data space. He gave one of the best-attended sessions at Strata + Hadoop World in Barcelona last year on some of his work at streamdrill.

I recently sat down with Braun for the latest episode of the O’Reilly Data Show Podcast, and we talked about machine learning, stream processing and analytics, his recent foray into data science training, and academia versus industry (his interests are a bit on the “applied” side, but he enjoys both).

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An example of a big data solution. Source: Mikio Braun, used with permission.

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A real-time processing revival

Things are moving fast in the stream processing world.

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Register for Strata + Hadoop World, London. Editor’s note: Ben Lorica is an advisor to Databricks and Graphistry. Many of the technologies discussed in this post will be covered in trainings, tutorials, and sessions at Strata + Hadoop World in London this coming May.

There’s renewed interest in stream processing and analytics. I write this based on some data points (attendance in webcasts and conference sessions; a recent meetup), and many conversations with technologists, startup founders, and investors. Certainly, applications are driving this recent resurgence. I’ve written previously about systems that come from IT operations as well as how the rise of cheap sensors are producing stream mining solutions from wearables (mostly health-related apps) and the IoT (consumer, industrial, and municipal settings). In this post, I’ll provide a short update on some of the systems that are being built to handle large amounts of event data.

Apache projects (Kafka, Storm, Spark Streaming, Flume) continue to be popular components in stream processing stacks (I’m not yet hearing much about Samza). Over the past year, many more engineers started deploying Kafka alongside one of the two leading distributed stream processing frameworks (Storm or Spark Streaming). Among the major Hadoop vendors, Hortonworks has been promoting Storm, Cloudera supports Spark Streaming, and MapR supports both. Kafka is a high-throughput distributed pub/sub system that provides a layer of indirection between “producers” that write to it and “consumers” that take data out of it. A new startup (Confluent) founded by the creators of Kafka should further accelerate the development of this already very popular system. Apache Flume is used to collect, aggregate, and move large amounts of streaming data, and is frequently used with Kafka (Flafka or Flume + Kafka). Spark Streaming continues to be one of the more popular components within the Spark ecosystem, and its creators have been adding features at a rapid pace (most recently Kafka integration, a Python API, and zero data loss). Read more…

Unit Testing Java 8 Lambda Expressions and Streams

Two approaches to testing lambdafied code.

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Over the past 18 months or so I’ve been talking to a lot of people about lambda expressions in Java 8. This isn’t that unusual when you’ve written a book on Java 8 and also run a training course on the topic! One of the questions I often get asked by people is how do lambda expressions alter how they test code? It’s an increasingly pertinent question in a world where more and more people have some kind of automated unit or regression test suite that runs over their project and when many people do Test Driven Development. Let’s explore some of the problems you may encounter when testing code that uses lambdas and streams and how to solve them.

Usually, when writing a unit test you call a method in your test code that gets called in your application. Given some inputs and possibly test doubles, you call these methods to test a certain behavior happening and then specify the changes you expect to result from this behavior.

Lambda expressions pose a slightly different challenge when unit testing code. Because they don’t have a name, it’s impossible to directly call them in your test code. You could choose to copy the body of the lambda expression into your test and then test that copy, but this approach has the unfortunate side effect of not actually testing the behavior of your implementation. If you change the implementation code, your test will still pass even though the implementation is performing a different task.

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Why local state is a fundamental primitive in stream processing

What do you get if you cross a distributed database with a stream processing system?

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One of the concepts that has proven the hardest to explain to people when I talk about Samza is the idea of fault-tolerant local state for stream processing. I think people are so used to the idea of keeping all their data in remote databases that any departure from that seems unusual.

So, I wanted to give a little bit more motivation as to why we think local state is a fundamental primitive in stream processing.

What is state and why do you need it?

An easy way to understand state in stream processing is to think about the kinds of operations you might do in SQL. Imagine running SQL queries against a real-time stream of data. If your SQL query contains only filtering and single-row transformations (a simple select and where clause, say), then it is stateless. That is, you can process a single row at a time without needing to remember anything in between rows. However, if your query involves aggregating many rows (a group by) or joining together data from multiple streams, then it must maintain some state in between rows. If you are grouping data by some field and counting, then the state you maintain would be the counts that have accumulated so far in the window you are processing. If you are joining two streams, the state would be the rows in each stream waiting to find a match in the other stream.

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Questioning the Lambda Architecture

The Lambda Architecture has its merits, but alternatives are worth exploring.

Nathan Marz wrote a popular blog post describing an idea he called the Lambda Architecture (“How to beat the CAP theorem“). The Lambda Architecture is an approach to building stream processing applications on top of MapReduce and Storm or similar systems. This has proven to be a surprisingly popular idea, with a dedicated website and an upcoming book. Since I’ve been involved in building out the real-time data processing infrastructure at LinkedIn using Kafka and Samza, I often get asked about the Lambda Architecture. I thought I would describe my thoughts and experiences.

What is a Lambda Architecture and how do I become one?

The Lambda Architecture looks something like this:

Lambda_Architecture Read more…