Most organisations are facing an explosion of data coming from new applications, new business opportunities, IoT and more. The ideal architecture most envision is a clean, optimised system that allows businesses to capitalise on all that data.
Traditional systems used for solving these problems were designed in an era that pre-dates large-scale distributed systems, and they lack the ability to scale to meet the needs of the modern data-driven organisation.
Streaming platforms are designed to solve these problems in a modern, distributed architecture. There are three benefits of streaming platforms that are of increasing benefit to organisations.
Messaging done right
In traditional enterprise messaging, there are the message queues and buses that connect many internal systems. Some companies run hundreds or thousands of individual messaging brokers, each independent and tailored to a subset of apps. Classic messaging systems are neither distributed nor scalable, and often support only one or a handful of applications.
By comparison, a data streaming platform is built on a distributed systems foundation, and scales to an entire company, supporting many of the kind of core applications messaging systems are used for and more.
Hadoop made fast
One way companies come to streaming is while implementing a big data project, and discovering their real-time needs. Like a data warehouse or data lake, streaming brings together data from across the organisation.
A good data streaming platform should be built to run queries, jobs or applications continuously. Batch processing is a non-starter, because 24-hour data is seen as stale.
Data integration made scalable
There have been whole generations of technologies that do nothing but handle data movement. EAI and ESBs handled quick, low volume data flow, while ETL handled slow, large volume, scalable data flow. Here, companies were traditionally forced to choose between latency or scalability and flexibility. One way to view a streaming platform is as an up-levelling of these systems where there doesn't need to be a choice between these options.
The most important point to consider is that a data streaming platform is, in its final form, an application development platform that enables continuous, scalable streams throughout a company. It does more than get data from place to place and munging it on the way; it is an infrastructure platform for building tomorrow's most advanced real-time applications.
A data streaming platform is a step change from traditional systems, able to meet the demands of a real-time world. They are designed to handle many types of data streams from across the business - including massive datasets - and distribute them in real-time.
