1. Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Applications
A data-intensive application is typically built from standard building blocks that provide commonly needed functionality. For example, many applications need to:
Store data so that they, or another application, can find it again later (databases)
Remember the result of an expensive operation, to speed up reads (caches)
Allow users to search data by keyword or filter it in various ways (search indexes)
Send a message to another process, to be handled asynchronously (stream processing)
Periodically crunch a large amount of accumulated data (batch processing)
There are many factors that may influence the design of a data system, including the skills and experience of the people involved, legacy system dependencies, the timescale for delivery, your organizationās tolerance of different kinds of risk, regulatory constraints, etc.
Everybody has an intuitive idea of what it means for something to be reliable or unreliable. For software, typical expectations include:
The application performs the function that the user expected.
It can tolerate the user making mistakes or using the software in unexpected ways.
Its performance is good enough for the required use case, under the expected load and data volume.
The system prevents any unauthorized access and abuse.
A fault is usually defined as one component of the system deviating from its spec, whereas a failure is when the system as a whole stops providing the required service to the user. It is impossible to reduce the probability of a fault to zero; therefore it is usually best to design fault-tolerance mechanisms that prevent faults from causing failures.
Another class of fault is a systematic error within the system [8]. Such faults are harder to anticipate, and because they are correlated across nodes, they tend to cause many more system failures than uncorrelated hardware faults [5]. Examples include:
A software bug that causes every instance of an application server to crash when given a particular bad input. For example, consider the leap second on June 30, 2012, that caused many applications to hang simultaneously due to a bug in the Linux kernel [9].
A runaway process that uses up some shared resourceāCPU time, memory, disk space, or network bandwidth.
A service that the system depends on that slows down, becomes unresponsive, or starts returning corrupted responses.
Cascading failures, where a small fault in one component triggers a fault in another component, which in turn triggers further faults [10].
1. Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Applications
A data-intensive application is typically built from standard building blocks that provide commonly needed functionality. For example, many applications need to:
Store data so that they, or another application, can find it again later (databases)
Remember the result of an expensive operation, to speed up reads (caches)
Allow users to search data by keyword or filter it in various ways (search indexes)
Send a message to another process, to be handled asynchronously (stream processing)
Periodically crunch a large amount of accumulated data (batch processing)
There are many factors that may influence the design of a data system, including the skills and experience of the people involved, legacy system dependencies, the timescale for delivery, your organizationās tolerance of different kinds of risk, regulatory constraints, etc.
Everybody has an intuitive idea of what it means for something to be reliable or unreliable. For software, typical expectations include:
The application performs the function that the user expected.
It can tolerate the user making mistakes or using the software in unexpected ways.
Its performance is good enough for the required use case, under the expected load and data volume.
The system prevents any unauthorized access and abuse.
A fault is usually defined as one component of the system deviating from its spec, whereas a failure is when the system as a whole stops providing the required service to the user. It is impossible to reduce the probability of a fault to zero; therefore it is usually best to design fault-tolerance mechanisms that prevent faults from causing failures.
Another class of fault is a systematic error within the system [8]. Such faults are harder to anticipate, and because they are correlated across nodes, they tend to cause many more system failures than uncorrelated hardware faults [5]. Examples include:
A software bug that causes every instance of an application server to crash when given a particular bad input. For example, consider the leap second on June 30, 2012, that caused many applications to hang simultaneously due to a bug in the Linux kernel [9].
A runaway process that uses up some shared resourceāCPU time, memory, disk space, or network bandwidth.
A service that the system depends on that slows down, becomes unresponsive, or starts returning corrupted responses.
Cascading failures, where a small fault in one component triggers a fault in another component, which in turn triggers further faults [10].
1. Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Applications
A data-intensive application is typically built from standard building blocks that provide commonly needed functionality. For example, many applications need to:
Store data so that they, or another application, can find it again later (databases)
Remember the result of an expensive operation, to speed up reads (caches)
Allow users to search data by keyword or filter it in various ways (search indexes)
Send a message to another process, to be handled asynchronously (stream processing)
Periodically crunch a large amount of accumulated data (batch processing)
There are many factors that may influence the design of a data system, including the skills and experience of the people involved, legacy system dependencies, the timescale for delivery, your organizationās tolerance of different kinds of risk, regulatory constraints, etc.
Everybody has an intuitive idea of what it means for something to be reliable or unreliable. For software, typical expectations include:
The application performs the function that the user expected.
It can tolerate the user making mistakes or using the software in unexpected ways.
Its performance is good enough for the required use case, under the expected load and data volume.
The system prevents any unauthorized access and abuse.
A fault is usually defined as one component of the system deviating from its spec, whereas a failure is when the system as a whole stops providing the required service to the user. It is impossible to reduce the probability of a fault to zero; therefore it is usually best to design fault-tolerance mechanisms that prevent faults from causing failures.
Another class of fault is a systematic error within the system [8]. Such faults are harder to anticipate, and because they are correlated across nodes, they tend to cause many more system failures than uncorrelated hardware faults [5]. Examples include:
A software bug that causes every instance of an application server to crash when given a particular bad input. For example, consider the leap second on June 30, 2012, that caused many applications to hang simultaneously due to a bug in the Linux kernel [9].
A runaway process that uses up some shared resourceāCPU time, memory, disk space, or network bandwidth.
A service that the system depends on that slows down, becomes unresponsive, or starts returning corrupted responses.
Cascading failures, where a small fault in one component triggers a fault in another component, which in turn triggers further faults [10].
New highlights added June 7, 2024 at 2:40 AM
Amazon has also observed that a 100 ms increase in response time reduces sales by 1% [20], and others report that a 1-second slowdown reduces a customer satisfaction metric by 16% [21, 22].
