Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

October 27, 2013

Applying the Big Data Lambda Architecture

Filed under: BigData,Drill,ElephantDB,HBase,HDFS,Storm — Patrick Durusau @ 7:38 pm

Applying the Big Data Lambda Architecture by Michael Hausenblas.

From the article:

Based on his experience working on distributed data processing systems at Twitter, Nathan Marz recently designed a generic architecture addressing common requirements, which he called the Lambda Architecture. Marz is well-known in Big Data: He’s the driving force behind Storm and at Twitter he  led the streaming compute team, which provides and develops shared infrastructure to support critical real-time applications.

Marz and his team described the underlying motivation for building systems with the lambda architecture as:

  • The need for a robust system that is fault-tolerant, both against hardware failures and human mistakes.
  • To serve a wide range of workloads and use cases, in which low-latency reads and updates are required. Related to this point, the system should support ad-hoc queries.
  • The system should be linearly scalable, and it should scale out rather than up, meaning that throwing more machines at the problem will do the job.
  • The system should be extensible so that features can be added easily, and it should be easily debuggable and require minimal maintenance.

From a bird’s eye view the lambda architecture has three major components that interact with new data coming in and responds to queries, which in this article are driven from the command line:

The goal of the article:

In this article, I employ the lambda architecture to implement what I call UberSocialNet (USN). This open-source project enables users to store and query acquaintanceship data. That is, I want to be able to capture whether I happen to know someone from multiple social networks, such as Twitter or LinkedIn, or from real-life circumstances. The aim is to scale out to several billions of users while providing low-latency access to the stored information. To keep the system simple and comprehensible, I limit myself to bulk import of the data (no capabilities to live-stream data from social networks) and provide only a very simple a command-line user interface. The guts, however, use the lambda architecture.

Something a bit challenging for the start of the week. 😉

February 19, 2011

ElephantDB

Filed under: Clojure,ElephantDB — Patrick Durusau @ 4:30 pm

ElephantDB

From the website:

ElephantDB is a database that specializes in exporting key/value data from Hadoop. ElephantDB is composed of two components. The first is a library that is used in MapReduce jobs for creating an indexed key/value dataset that is stored on a distributed filesystem. The second component is a daemon that can download a subset of a dataset and serve it in a read-only, random-access fashion. A group of machines working together to serve a full dataset is called a ring.

Since ElephantDB server doesn’t support random writes, it is almost laughingly simple. Once the server loads up its subset of the data, it does very little. This leads to ElephantDB being rock-solid in production, since there’s almost no moving parts.

ElephantDB server has a Thrift interface, so any language can make reads from it. The database itself is implemented in Clojure.

I rather like that, “…almost no moving parts.”

That has to pay real dividends over the id shuffle in some topic map implementations. Both in terms of processing overhead as well as in auditing.

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