You’re probably heard of the “SMACK Stack”, but you may not know that we have three experts at Lightbend–Sean Glover, Stavros Kontopoulos, and Gerard Maas–that recently teamed up with O’Reilly Media on a free eBook about working with the SMACK stack for Fast Data applications. Get it here in PDF, EPUB, and MOBI formats–or all 3 in a .zip folder!
To remain competitive in a market that demands real-time responses to these digital pulses, organizations are adopting Fast Data applications as a key asset in their technology portfolio. This application development is driven by the need to accelerate the extraction of value from the data entering the organization.
The streaming workloads that underpin Fast Data applications are often complementary to or work alongside existing batch-oriented processes. In some cases, they even completely replace legacy batch processes as the maturing streaming technology becomes able to deliver the data consistency warranties that organizations require.
Fast Data applications take many forms, from streaming ETL (extract, transform, and load) workloads, to crunching data for online dashboards, to estimating your purchase likelihood in a machine learning–driven product recommendation. Although the requirements for Fast Data applications vary wildly from one use case to the next, there are common architectural patterns that form the foundations of successful deployments.
Inside Designing Fast Data Application Architectures, our three Lightbend experts identify the key architectural characteristics of Fast Data application architectures, breaking them into functional blocks, and explore some of the leading technologies provided in Lightbend Fast Data Platform that implement it all–including Spark, Mesos, Akka, Cassandra, Kafka, and others.
After reading this report, you will have a better understanding of Fast Data applications and their key architectural characteristics. In the end, you'll be more informed on how to choose, combine, and run available technologies to build resilient, scalable, and responsive systems that deliver the Fast Data application that the industry requires (and expects).
