Start small, succeed and then scale - Mark Palmer's best practice on employing event processing in an enterprise

One of the observations is that it is not trivial for enterprises  that are used to legacy systems and legacy systems and legacy developers to adapt to event processing thinking.  I have written about it recently.  A recent meeting with a customer triggered the initial reaction - "but we don't know how to work this way", the way they know how to work is: getting events, inserting them to a database, and ask periodic and on request queries.   I have also recently compared the request driven (legacy) approach and the event driven approach. 

Mark Palmer, CEO of Streambase, has recently written a "best practice"  on this topic of how to introduce event processing in an enterprise, and entitled the best practice "Start small, succeed and then scale".  

Mark starts by asserting that real-time becomes a must do agenda in many enterprises, and many type of applications, but the problem is that both legacy systems and people require an overhaul. 

His methodology is - choosing a small, but important application, put the best people on it, iterate if failure, learn from experience, and then scale it to other functions and applications.    I think that this is a good approach, it would also be interesting to have some experience reports about application of this best practice in reality.     I'll write more about this topic - later.

Event processing at the core of automated commerce systems

This illustration is taken from Chris Taylor's Blog, where he posted a piece entitled:  "There's a technology tsunami hitting the world of commerce".  Chris makes distinction between the hype technologies:  cloud, analytics, big data, and mobile, and claims that all of them have role in the story of commerce, however the core technologies doing the heavy lifting are: integration, managed file transfer, in-memory data, log file management, event processing and business process.

As for event processing, Chris believes it is the core, and issues the nervous system of the commerce which enables to automate it, as commerce is event driven by nature - buy and sell are events, and so are payments, fairness rules, credit decisions, fraud detection, and management of the commerce system itself. 

Note that illustration follows the 4D: detect (channel), derive (pattern detection), decide (decision), do (actions).  The "decide" part is not necessarily "IF---THEN" rules, but can also be optimization or another event driven pattern. 

getting back from New Zealand

I have not written in this Blog for over a month - I spent a relatively long vacation in New Zealand.  In the picture above you can see me in front of Huka Falls in the North island,  below it is a picture of Doubtful Sound, one of the fiords in the south island. 

New Zealand has many types of views -- beaches, fiords, alpine mountains, glaciers, rain-forests and more.

You can view a full album (actually two - one for the north island and one of the south island) in my facebook account (I made it public, you don't have to be my FB friend to view it).  

The people of NZ call themselves "kiwis" after a strange bird that they adore,  there is also a big effort, seen everywhere to restore some of the original ecology of NZ before the human race destroyed it when introducing foreign animals and trees.  

Got back a week ago and catching up on other things, and will resume professional blogging soon.

Towards a vacation in New Zealand

All packed to travel to New Zealand later today.

Plan for 25 days in NZ + 2 days each direction in the way (staying over night in Hong Kong). 

Will also be mostly disconnected from cyberspace, Email etc  -- (this is the whole point!).

The Blog is going also to vacation.   Catch up later. 

StreamInsight as a cloud service

The idea of using event processing in "software as a service" mode is not new;  thanks to Marco's Blog,  I came across an article describing the StreamInsights cloud service.  The rationale behind it is that it should be used in cases that it is more cost-effective to customer relative to purchasing expensive hardware needed for processing large volumes of events.    This is part of the general trend to use the cloud for various purposes.  I assume that this will be one of the main ways that event processing will be consumed in the future. 

IFTTT - additional cool event-driven tool

I have written earlier this week about "world stream computing" as the new web paradigm, where the web becomes event-driven based on streams of events.   We can see some mobile based applications that conform with the paradigm.  I have written before about On{X}which is based on "event-action" recipes.

Another member in this family is IFTTT (acronym for: if this than that).  Like On{X}, IFTTT also uses the term recipes, it has a large set of shared recipes, which have visual icons (e.g. the Twitter Icon, the Facebook icon and more). 

Some recipes examples are:

Turn off light (on the mobile) when sun rises 

When sometimes tags my name on Instagram, send me SMS

If I check-in into an office, create LinkedIn status

As one can see the events can be events related to various social media, or other feeds (such as weather feeds),  and the actions are actually of the same type.

I have gave as an assignment for students in a seminar last semester to experiment with some tools, and experiment on people who are not IT professionals, if they can get it.  One of the student teams chose IFTTT, and succeeded to get two non IT professional people to download it, use it, and create some new  recipes.  It took them some iterations to learn it (it is not that trivial), but after an hour, they could generate recipes without problem, and noted that it is working smoothly.  

I guess that these are relatively simple tools that precede the new "active" web wave...

World Stream computing to replace the Web

I came across an interesting article by David Gelernter.  Gerlenter, a Yale Professor, who co-introduced the term "lifestreams" in the 199o-ies, proceeds in the same spirit and talks about "worldstreams" which he defines as a collection of heterogeneous real-time messaging stream  (may be thought as a collection of streams).   His prophecy is that this will be a disruptive technology for the web, browsers, search, operating systems.  We will no longer surf in sites and search the web,  but we'll browse the worldstream, and ask the worldstream to bring us what we want, in the time we want it, instead of search for it.    The event processing grand challenge, which was part of the event processing manifesto,  and talked about the "event fabric" was similar in nature, but the manifesto authors did not claim that the web will be replaced,  it will probably not happen in one step anyway.    However -- certainly interesting observation, and promises bright future...