Are databases too slow for your application? I don’t mean, is your database slow, and do queries take minutes to complete. I mean, is an optimized database still too slow for the rate at which things happen? That brings you into the stream processing world, where data arrives very fast. You need to make decisions quickly and act on those decisions immediately. One example is credit card processing, where instant fraud identification can prevent transactions from being approved. Another is real-time cyber-threat analytics, where every request to a website or application is validated before acceptance. In both cases, there are a massive number of transactions to monitor and complex scoring that is required within the allowed latency for the transaction. This is the space where Hazelcast plays, unifying large amounts of slower changing data with fast arriving streamed data. The slower changing data might be machine learning models and reference data, which are then used to evaluate the faster-arriving data stream. This is not an infrastructure feature; it is an application platform service. To use Hazelcast, your application will be developed using the Hazelcast SDK. There will be fast infrastructure to support your Hazelcast application: fast networks and powerful servers. The architecture is a grid or cluster, so several servers working together in a distributed architecture to provide a memory-first database and stream engine.
I heard from Hazelcast at Cloud Field Day 11; they have presented at several Tech Field Day events. My usual Tech Field Day disclaimer applies. If you have a big problem, and if a standard database just isn’t fast enough, maybe Hazelcast can handle your data rate.
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