Cassandra summit-2013

Real Time Big Data With Storm,
Cassandra, and In-Memory Computing
DeWayne Filppi
@dfilppi

Big Data Predictions
“Over the next few years we'll see the adoption of scalable
frameworks and platforms for handling
streaming, or near real-time, analysis and processing. In the
same way that Hadoop has been borne out of large-scale web
applications, these platforms will be driven by the needs of large-
scale location-aware mobile, social and sensor use.”
Edd Dumbill, O’REILLY
2
® Copyright 2013 Gigaspaces Ltd. All Rights Reserved

® Copyright 2013 Gigaspaces Ltd. All Rights Reserved3
The Two Vs of Big Data
Velocity Volume

We’re Living in a Real Time World…
Homeland Security
Real Time Search
Social
eCommerce
User Tracking &
Engagement
Financial Services

The Flavors of Big Data Analytics
Counting Correlating Research

Analytics @ Twitter – Counting
 How many signups,
tweets, retweets for a
topic?
 What’s the average
latency?
 Demographics
 Countries and cities
 Gender
 Age groups
 Device types
 …

Analytics @ Twitter – Correlating
 What devices fail at the
same time?
 What features get user
hooked?
 What places on the
globe are “happening”?

Analytics @ Twitter – Research
 Sentiment analysis
 “Obama is popular”
 Trends
 “People like to tweet
after watching
American Idol”
 Spam patterns
 How can you tell when
a user spams?

It’s All about Timing
“Real time”
(< few Seconds)
Reasonably Quick
(seconds - minutes)
Batch
(hours/days)

It’s All about Timing
• Event driven / stream processing
• High resolution – every tweet gets counted
• Ad-hoc querying
• Medium resolution (aggregations)
• Long running batch jobs (ETL, map/reduce)
• Low resolution (trends & patterns)
This is what
we’re here
to discuss 

VELOCITY + VAST VOLUME =
IN MEMORY + BIG DATA
11

 RAM is the new disk
 Data partitioned across a cluster
 Large “virtual” memory space
 Transactional
 Highly available
 Code collocated with data.
In Memory Data Grid Review

Data Grid + Cassandra: A Complete Solution
• Data flows through the in-memory cluster async to Cassandra
• Side effects calculated
• Filtering an option
• Enrichment an option
• Results instantly available
• Internal and external event listeners notified

Simplified Event Flow

Grid – Cassandra Interface
 Hector and CQL based interface
 In memory data must be mapped to column families.
 Configurable class to column family mapping
 Must serialize individual fields
 Fixed fields can use defined types
 Variable fields ( for schemaless in-memory mode) need serializers
 Object model flattening
 By default, nested fields are flattened.
 Can be overridden by custom serializer.

Virtues and Limitations
 Could be faster: high availability has a cost
 Complex flows not easy to assemble or understand with simple
event handlers
 Complete stack, not just two tools of many
 Fast.
 Microsecond latencies for in memory operations
 Fast enough for almost anybody
 Highly available/self healing
 Elastic

 Popular open source, real time, in-memory, streaming
computation platform.
 Includes distributed runtime and intuitive API for defining
distributed processing flows.
 Scalable and fault tolerant.
 Developed at BackType,
and open sourced by Twitter
Storm Background

 Streams
 Unbounded sequence of tuples
 Spouts
 Source of streams (Queues)
 Bolts
 Functions, Filters, Joins, Aggregations
 Topologies
Storm Abstractions
Spout
Bolt
Topologies

Streaming word count with Storm
 Storm has a simple builder interface to creating stream processing
topologies
 Storm delegates persistence to external providers
 Cassandra, because of its write performance, is commonly used

Storm : Optimistic Processing
 Storm (quite rationally) assumes success is normal
 Storm uses batching and pipelining for performance
 Therefore the spout must be able to replay tuples on demand
in case of error.
 Any kind of quasi-queue like data source can be fashioned
into a spout.
 No persistence is ever required, and speed attained by
minimizing network hops during topology processing.

Fast. Want to go faster?
 Eliminate non-memory components
 Substitute disk based queue for reliable in-memory queue
 Substitute disk based state persistence to in-memory
persistence
 Asynchronously update disk based state (C*)

Sample Architecture

References
 Try the Cloudify recipe
 Download Cloudify : http://www.cloudifysource.org/
 Download the Recipe (apps/xapstream, services/xapstream):
– https://github.com/CloudifySource/cloudify-recipes
 XAP – Cassandra Interface Details;
 http://wiki.gigaspaces.com/wiki/display/XAP95/Cassandra+Space+Persistency
 Check out the source for the XAP Spout and a sample state
implementation backed by XAP, and a Storm friendly streaming
implemention on github:
 https://github.com/Gigaspaces/storm-integration
 For more background on the effort, check out my recent blog posts at
http://blog.gigaspaces.com/
 http://blog.gigaspaces.com/gigaspaces-and-storm-part-1-storm-clouds/
 http://blog.gigaspaces.com/gigaspaces-and-storm-part-2-xap-integration/
 Part 3 coming soon.

Twitter Storm With Cassandra

Storm Overview

 Streams
 Unbounded sequence of tuples
 Spouts
 Source of streams (Queues)
 Bolts
 Functions, Filters, Joins, Aggregations
 Topologies
Storm Concepts
Spouts
Bolt
Topologies

Challenge – Word Count
Word:Count
Tweets
Count
• Hottest topics
• URL mentions
• etc.

Streaming word count with Storm

Supercharging Storm
 Storm doesn’t supply persistence, but provides for it
 Storm optimizes IO to slow persistence (e.g. databases) using
batching.
 Storm processes streams. The stream provider itself needs to
support persistency, batching, and reliability.
Tweets,
events,whatever….

XAP Real Time Analytics

® Copyright 2011 Gigaspaces Ltd. All Rights Reserved
Two Layer Approach
 Advantage: Minimal
“impedance mismatch”
between layers.
– Both NoSQL cluster
technologies, with similar
advantages
 Grid layer serves as an in
memory cache for interactive
requests.
 Grid layer serves as a real time
computation fabric for CEP, and
limited ( to allocated memory)
real time distributed query
capability.
In Memory Compute Cluster
NoSQL Cluster
...
RawEventStream
RawEventStream
RawEventStream
RealTimeEvents
Raw And Derived Events
RealTimeEvents
ReportingEngine
SCALE
SCALE

Simplified Architecture

 Flowing event streams through memory for side effects
 Event driven architecture executing in-memory
 Raw events flushed, aggregations/derivations retained
 All layers horizontally scalable
 All layers highly available
 Real-time analytics & cached batch analytics on same scalable
layer
 Data grid provides a transactional/consistent façade on NoSQL
store (in this case eliminating SQL database entirely)
Key Concepts

Keep Things In Memory
Facebook keeps 80% of its
data in Memory
(Stanford research)
RAM is 100-1000x faster
than Disk (Random seek)
• Disk: 5 -10ms
• RAM: ~0.001msec

Take Aways
 A data grid can serve different needs for big data analytics:
 Supercharge a dedicated stream processing cluster like Storm.
– Provide fast, reliable, transactional tuple streams and state
 Provide a general purpose analytics platform
– Roll your own
 Simplify overall architecture while enhancing scalability
– Ultra high performance/low latency
– Dynamically scalable processing and in-memory storage
– Eliminate messaging tier
– Eliminate or minimize need for RDBMS

 Realtime Analytics with Storm and Hadoop
 http://www.slideshare.net/Hadoop_Summit/realtime-
analytics-with-storm
 Learn and fork the code on github:
https://github.com/Gigaspaces/storm-integration
 Twitter Storm:
http://storm-project.net
 XAP + Storm Detailed Blog Post
http://blog.gigaspaces.com/gigaspaces-and-storm-part-2-
xap-integration/
References

Cassandra summit-2013

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