Edward Capriolo suggesting an alternative approach to real-time analytics backed by solutions like Rainbird, Flume, Scribe, or Storm:

Distributed processing is RTA requirement #2 which is where IronCount comes in. It is great that we can throw tons of messages into Kafka, but we do not have a system to process these messages. We could pick say 4 servers on our network and write a program implementing a Kafka Consumer interface to process messages, write init scripts, write nagios check, manage it. How to stop it start it upgrade it? How should the code even be written? What if we need to run two programs, or five or ten?

IronCount gives an simple answer for this questions. It starts by abstracting users from many of the questions mentioned above. Users need to only implement a single interface.

In a way this post reminded me of Ted Dziuba’s Taco Bell Programming:

The more I write code and design systems, the more I understand that many times, you can achieve the desired functionality simply with clever reconfigurations of the basic Unix tool set. After all, functionality is an asset, but code is a liability.

Original title and link: Real-Time Analytics With Kafka and IronCount (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

via: http://www.edwardcapriolo.com/roller/edwardcapriolo/entry/what_is_the_deal_with