About this Book
The world of real-time systems has been around for a long time; for many years real-time and/or streaming was solely the domain of hardware real-time systems. Those are systems where if an SLA isn’t met, there is potential loss of life. Over the last decade near-real-time systems have emerged and grown at an amazing rate. Everywhere you look you can find examples of data streaming: social media, games, smart cities, smart meters, your new washing machine, and the list goes on. Consider the following: Today if a byte of data were a gallon of water, an average home would be filled within 10 seconds; by the year 2020, it will only take 2 seconds. Making sense of and using such a deluge of data means building streaming systems.
Focusing on the big ideas of streaming and real-time data, the goals of this book are two-fold: The first objective is to teach you how to think about the entire pipeline so you’re equipped with the skills to not only build a streaming system but also understand the tradeoffs at every tier. Secondly, this book is meant to provide a solid launching point for you to delve deeper into each tier, as your business needs require or as your interest pulls you.