We’ve been working on a number of projects recently involving open source software often quoted as ‘Big Data’ solutions – here’s a quick overview of them.
The grandfather of them all of course is Apache Hadoop, now not so much a single project as an ecosystem including storage and processing for potentially huge amounts of data, spread across clusters of machines. Interestingly Hadoop was originally created by Doug Cutting, who also wrote Lucene (the search library used by Apache Solr and Elasticsearch) and the Nutch web crawler. We’ve been helping clients distribute processing tasks using Hadoop’s MapReduce algorithm and also to speed up their indexing from Hadoop into Elasticsearch. Other projects we’ve used in the Hadoop ecosystem include Apache Zookeeper (used to coordinate lots of Solr servers into a distributed SolrCloud) and Apache Spark (for distributed processing).
We’re increasingly using Apache Kafka (a message broker) for handling large volumes of streaming data, for example log files. Kafka provides persistent storage of these streams, which might be ingested and pre-processed using Logstash and then indexed with Elasticsearch and visualised with Kibana to build high-performance monitoring systems. Throughput of thousands of items a second is not uncommon and these open source systems can easily match the performance of proprietary monitoring engines such as Splunk at a far lower cost. Apache Samza, a stream processing framework, is based on Kafka and we’ve built a powerful full-text search for streams system using it. Note that Elasticsearch has a similar ‘stored search’ feature called Percolator, but this is quite a lot slower (as others have confirmed).
Most of the above systems are written in Java, and if not run on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), so our experience building large, performant and resilient systems on this platform has been invaluable. We’ll be writing in more detail about these projects soon. I’ve always said that search experts have been dealing with Big Data since well before it gained popularity as a concept – so if you’re serious about Big Data, ask us how we could help!
i am a database architech having 8 yrs of experience .. am looking forward to explore into the Big data thing and eager to learn kafka samza.. kindly help how can i get a practical experience
There’s a mailing list you can join which might be a good start – but like all open source projects, the best place to start is by downloading the software itself and having a go! There’s also a quickstart guide.