Processing Billions of Events in Real-Time with Heron by Karthik Ramasamy, Twitter
Channel: The Linux Foundation
Date: 2016-10-26

Processing Billions of Events in Real-Time with Heron - Karthik Ramasamy, Twitter

Twitter generates tens of billions of events per hour when users interact with it. Analyzing these events to surface relevant content and to derive insights in real time is a challenge. To address this, we developed Heron, a new real time distributed streaming engine. In this talk, we first describe the design goals of Heron and show how the Heron architecture achieves task isolation and resource reservation to ease debugging, troubleshooting, and seamless use of shared cluster infrastructure with other critical Twitter services. We subsequently explore how a topology self adjusts using back pressure so that the pace of the topology goes as its slowest component. Finally, we outline how Heron implements at most once and at least once semantics and we describe a few operational stories based on running Heron in production.

About Karthik Ramasamy

Karthik Ramasamy, Engineering Manager and Technical Lead for Real Time Analytics, TwitternKarthik Ramasamy is the engineering manager and technical lead for real-time analytics at Twitter. He has two decades of experience working in parallel databases, big data infrastructure, and networking. He cofounded Locomatix, a company that specializes in real-time streaming processing on Hadoop and Cassandra using SQL, that was acquired by Twitter. Before Locomatix, he was at Greenplum and Juniper Networks. At the University of Wisconsin he worked extensively in parallel database systems, query processing, scale out technologies, storage engines, and online analytical systems. Karthik is the author of several publications, patents, and Network Routing: Algorithms, Protocols and Architectures. He has a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison with a focus on databases.