EBay Develops Open Source Pulsar for Real Time Data Analysis
April 2, 2015
A new large-scale, real-time analytics platform has been launched in response to one huge company’s huge data needs. VentureBeat reports, “EBay Launches Pulsar, an Open-Source Tool for Quickly Taming Big Data.” EBay has made the code available under an open-source license. It seems traditional batch processing systems, like that found in the widely used open-source Hadoop, just won’t cut it for eBay. That puts them in good company; Google, Microsoft, Twitter, and LinkedIn have each also created their own stream-processing systems.
Shortly before the launch, eBay released a whitepaper on the project, “Pulsar—Real-time Analytics at Scale.” It describes the what and why behind Pulsar’s design; check it out for the technical details. The whitepaper summarizes itself:
“In this paper we have described the data and processing model for a class of problems related to user behavior analytics in real time. We describe some of the design considerations for Pulsar. Pulsar has been in production in the eBay cloud for over a year. We process hundreds of thousands of events/sec with a steady state loss of less than 0.01%. Our pipeline end to end latency is less than a hundred milliseconds measured at the 95th percentile. We have successfully operated the pipeline over this time at 99.99% availability. Several teams within eBay have successfully built solutions leveraging our platform, solving problems like in-session personalization, advertising, internet marketing, billing, business monitoring and many more.”
For updated information on Pulsar, monitor their official website at gopulsar.io.
Cynthia Murrell, April 2, 2015
Stephen E Arnold, Publisher of CyberOSINT at www.xenky.com