In building the next generation of applications, companies and stakeholders need to adopt new paradigms. The need for this shift is predicated on the fundamental belief that building a new application at scale requires tailored solutions to that application’s unique challenges, business model and ROI. Some things change, and I’d like to point to some of that changes.
Event Driven vs. CRUD
Software development traditionally is driven by entity-relation modeling and CRUD operations on that data. The modern world isn’t about data at rest, it’s about being responsive to events in flight. This doesn’t mean that you don’t have data at rest, but that this data shouldn’t be organized in silos.
The traditional CRUD model is neither expressive nor responsive, given by the amount of uncountable available data sources. Since all data is structured somehow, an RDBMS isn't able to store and work with data when the schema isn't known (schema on write). That makes the use of additional free available data more like an adventure than a valid business model, given that the schema isn't known and can change rapidly. Event driven approaches are much more dynamical, open and make the data valuable for other processes and applications. The view to the data is defined by the use of the data (schema on read). This views can be created manually (Data Scientist), automatically (Hive and Avro for example) or explorative (R, AI, NNW).
Centralized vs Siloed Data Stores
BigData projects often fail by not using a centralized data store, often refereed as Data Lake or Data Hub. It’s essential to understand the idea of a Data Lake and the need for it. Siloed solutions (aka data warehouse solutions) have only data which match the schema and nothing else. Every schema is different, and often it’s impossible to use them in new analytic applications. In a Data Lake the data is stored as it is - originally, untouched, uncleaned, disaggregated. That makes the entry (or low hanging fruit) mostly easy - just start to catch all data you can get. Offload RDBMS and DWs to your Hadoop cluster and start the journey by playing with that data, even by using 3rd party tools instead to develop own tailored apps. Even when this data comes from different DWH's, mining and correlating them often brings treasures to light.
Scaled vs. Monolith Development
Custom processing at scale involves tailored algorithms, be they custom Hadoop jobs, in-memory approaches for matching and augmentation or 3rd party applications. Hadoop is nothing more (or less) than a framework which allows the user to work within a distributed system, splitting workloads into smaller tasks and let those tasks run on different nodes. The interface to that system are reusable API's and Libraries. That makes the use of Hadoop so convenient - the user doesn't need to take care about the distribution of tasks nor to know exactly how the framework works. Additionally, every piece of written code can be reused by others without having large code depts.
On the other hand Hadoop gives the user an interface to configure the framework to match the application needs dynamically on runtime, instead of having static configurations like traditional processing systems.
Having this principles in mind by planning and architecting new applications, based on Hadoop or similar technologies doesn’t guarantee success, but it lowers the risk to get lost. Worth to note that every success has had many failures before. Not trying to create something new is the biggest mistake we can made, and will result sooner or later in a total loss.
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