Preface

A continuous stream of real-world and digital events already power the company where you work, even though you probably don’t think in those terms. Instead, you likely think about your daily work in terms of the people or things that you interact with, the software or hardware you use to get stuff done, or your own microcosm of a to-do list of tasks.

Computers can’t think like this! Instead, computers see a company as an organization that generates a response to a continuous stream of events. We believe that reframing your business in terms of a continuous stream of events offers huge benefits. This is a young but hugely important field, and there is a lot still to discuss.

Event Streams in Action is all about events: how to define events, how to send streams of events into unified log technologies like Apache Kafka and Amazon Kinesis, and how to write applications that process those event streams. We’re going to cover a lot of ground in this book: Kafka and Kinesis, stream processing frameworks like Samza and Spark Streaming, event-friendly databases like Amazon Redshift, and more.

This book will give you confidence to identify, model, and process event streams wherever you find them—and we guarantee that by the end of this book, you will be seeing event streams everywhere! Above all, we hope that this book acts as a springboard for a broader conversation about how we, as software engineers, should work with events.