Apache Spark is a system for processing large data sets in parallel. The core abstraction of Spark is the resilient distributed dataset (RDD), a working set of data that sits in memory for fast, iterative processing. Matei Zaharia created Spark with two goals: to provide a composable, high-level set of APIs for performing distributed processing;

Kafka is at the center of modern streaming systems. Kafka serves as a database, a pubsub system, a buffer, and a data recovery tool. It’s an extremely flexible tool, and that flexibility has led to its use as a platform for a wide variety of data intensive applications. Today’s guest is Gwen Shapira, a product

Streaming architecture defines how large volumes of data make their way through an organization. Data is created at a user’s smartphone, or on a sensor inside of a conveyor belt at a factory. That data is sent to a set of backend services that aggregate the data, organizing it and making it available to business

When you go to a website where a video is playing, and your video lags, how does the website know that you are having a bad experience? Problems with video are often not complete failures–maybe part of the video loads, and plays just fine, and then the rest of the video is buffering. You have

At a big enough scale, every software product produces lots of data. Whether you are building an advertising technology company, a social network, or a system for IoT devices, you have thousands of events coming in at a fast pace that you want to aggregate, study and act upon. For the last decade, engineers have

In the 1980s and the 1990s, most applications used only a relational database for their data management. In the early 2000s, software projects started to use an ever increasing number of data sources. MongoDB popularized the document database, which allows storage of objects that do not have a consistent schema. The Hadoop distributed file system

When engineers are writing code, they are manipulating objects. You might have a user object represented on your computer, and that user object has several different fields—a name, a gender, and an age. When you want to send that object across the network to a different computer, the object needs to be turned into a

A company’s approach to data can make or break the business. In the past, data was static. There was not much data, it sat in Excel, and it was interacted with on a nightly or monthly basis. Now, data is dynamic, real time and huge. To tap into available data, many industries have oriented themselves

Large-scale data analysis was pioneered by Google, with the MapReduce paper. Since then, Google’s approach to analytics has evolved rapidly, marked by papers such as Dataflow and Dremel. Dremel combined a column-oriented, distributed file system with a novel way of processing queries. A single Dremel query is distributed into a tree of servers, starting with

The New York Times is a newspaper that evolved into a digital publication. Across its 166 year history, The Times has been known for longform journalistic quality, in addition to its ability to quickly churn out news stories. Some content on the New York Times is old but timeless “evergreen” content. Readers of the New York