From Traditional to Trailblazing

The world is shifting to real-time. Our appetite as consumers is insatiable.  As we get one thing, we immediately expect another. Whether we are using an app on our phone or a business system at work, we want everything as it happens.  I want to pay my friends reliably and instantly – it’s the same need as when a customer record is updated at work, I want it immediately, everywhere.  

Need for speed

That’s easy for me (and us) to demand, but difficult for the tech folks to deliver.  It takes a long time to build a system to satisfy our demands; even when they do, glitches happen regularly.  For example, here are a few glitches that I have experienced in my personal life in just the last two weeks:

-   Ride-share app reminding me to tip after I have already tipped

-   Online grocery shopping service not sending an email to reset my forgotten password

-   Items not added to my online shopping cart

-   My credit card app not being able to initiate Face ID on the app

-   A 3^rd party video conference is not getting added to a meeting on my calendar 

Sound familiar?

Implications of not having real-time capabilities 

Some of these are minor inconveniences that I can live with. Others, not so much. As a sales leader, a classic example is this: I want any customer update or new lead entry into our CRM to be immediately propagated throughout all of our marketing automation systems and vice versa. However, I have always been told that I can’t have real-time integration when I connect or use 3^rd party applications. So, I end up normalizing to delays of 15 minutes or longer, or sometimes not getting what I want at all. 

If such issues are common with large players such as Google, Zoom, American Express, Uber, Instacart, Costco, Salesforce, and Adobe, etc., what are the realities for smaller companies trying to provide services for their customers? The obvious solution for these companies would be to build robust event-streaming environments. However, this is easier said than done. Let’s dive into what makes it hard to build event streaming applications 

Shortcomings of status-quo offerings

The event streaming ecosystem is full of successful companies each worth several billion dollars. Some do stream ingestion, some do stream processing, some do orchestration, some offer databases, etc. Organizations have adjusted to the norm that to build streaming applications one has to cobble together 6-8 different products to handle various steps of the transaction. Afterall, these products are best of breed o  they were first to market or the largest revenue producing products.

However, this status quo starts to break pretty soon. The process of building event streaming applications is both highly complex and expensive to build, operate and support. Consider the following scenarios

• As each vendor is merely a piece of the ultimate puzzle, the shortcomings of one vendor becomes intrinsic to the design that cannot be easily changed
• How do you handle the data loss or message failures between components?
• How do you back up 6-8 different products independently and try to stitch them back together in the event of a failure? 
• What is the real RTO? What is the overall availability and durability standard of this combined system?
• How many specialists are required to meet the stringent demands of customers?
• Once a streaming environment is up and running, how does one support this environment?

The more broader question to ask is why would anyone even want to take on that level of complexity? In addition to the components, the connectors used to integrate the components will have issues as you scale. Ask anyone who supports an event streaming environment and they will tell you all about the never-ending challenges. 

In truth, I applaud those who have succeeded in figuring out the solutions that are available to us today. Each solution has its place in the market, but combining a bunch of them won’t make a comprehensive real time event streaming solution.

The more broader question to ask is why would anyone even want to take on the complexity of integrating multiple clustered products?

The Answer: An integrated approach to fix streaming

I joined Grainite because it is the first product written from the ground up for streaming data. Throughout my career, I’ve brought technology to market that can change the world and have done it surrounded by great people. Our Co-Founders, Ashish Kumar and Abhishek Chauhan, ran very large teams at Google and Citrix. They had virtually unlimited resources to solve even the biggest challenges - with every technology available in the market at their fingertips, and untold industry specialists to solve the inevitable problems. They tried building event streaming applications and found the same inherent problems with traditional architecture.  Abhishek even wrote about his experience here. They studied what an ideal solution should look like if built thoughtfully from the ground up and then decided to found Grainite to finally bring that solution to market.

Grainite is a stateful, strongly consistent streaming application platform. It integrates key level concurrent data ingestion, event processing, data materialization, and storage into a single Kubernetes-managed cluster. Grainite can scale infinitely, and guarantee that every event is atomic and is transmitted exactly-once, while providing enterprise manageability and reliability.  

Enterprises need reliable data and they need it in real time. Grainite offers a platform that gets them there 90% faster with 1/10^th of the resources. Imagine being able to innovate 10 times faster and reduce your operations overhead by 90%. Imagine no more!  Your developers write your application and the platform takes care of the resiliency, scaling and enterprise readiness. Grainite runs on Kubernetes using all popular public clouds or even in your data center.

Imagine being able to innovate 10 times faster and reduce your operations overhead by 90%

Take the Grainite challenge today: upgrade your approach and stop throwing good money after bad! We can help you deliver what your business needs and out-innovate your competitors.  Watch this space for a series of blogs that will dive into how Grainite’s offering is superior to each traditional siloed product’s specialty in event stream processing. We have a complete, integrated platform that is better than every component at every level. The future is here – don’t let your competitors upgrade to Grainite before you do! What have you got to lose?

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