Details about Designing Data-Intensive Applications
Designing Data-Intensive Applications ePub PDF free download – This book is for software engineers, software architects, and technical managers who love to code. It is especially relevant if you need to make decisions about the architec‐ ture of the systems you work on—for example, if you need to choose tools for solving a given problem and figure out how best to apply them. But even if you have no choice over your tools, this book will help you better understand their strengths and weaknesses. You should have some experience building web-based applications or network serv‐ ices, and you should be familiar with relational databases and SQL. Any nonrelational databases and other data-related tools you know are a bonus, but not required. A general understanding of common network protocols like TCP and HTTP is helpful. Your choice of programming language or framework makes no dif‐ ference for this book.
Sometimes, when discussing scalable data systems, people make comments along the lines of, “You’re not Google or Amazon. Stop worrying about scale and just use a relational database.” There is truth in that statement: building for scale that you don’t need is wasted effort and may lock you into an inflexible design. In effect, it is a form of premature optimization. However, it’s also important to choose the right tool for the job, and different technologies each have their own strengths and weaknesses. As we shall see, relational databases are important but not the final word on dealing with data.
In the ebook editions we have included links to the full text of online resources. All links were verified at the time of publication, but unfortunately links tend to break frequently due to the nature of the web. If you come across a broken link, or if you are reading a print copy of this book, you can look up references using a search engine. For academic papers, you can search for the title in Google Scholar to find open-access PDF files. Alternatively, you can find all of the references at https:// github.com/ept/ddia-references, where we maintain up-to-date links. We look primarily at the architecture of data systems and the ways they are integrated into data-intensive applications. This book doesn’t have space to cover deployment, operations, security, management, and other areas—those are complex and impor‐ tant topics, and we wouldn’t do them justice by making them superficial side notes in this book. They deserve books of their own. Many of the technologies described in this book fall within the realm of the Big Data buzzword. However, the term “Big Data” is so overused and underdefined that it is not useful in a serious engineering discussion. This book uses less ambiguous terms, such as single-node versus distributed systems, or online/interactive versus offline/ batch processing systems. This book has a bias toward free and open source software (FOSS), because reading, modifying, and executing source code is a great way to understand how something works in detail. Open platforms also reduce the risk of vendor lock-in. However, where appropriate, we also discuss proprietary software (closed-source software, soft‐ ware as a service, or companies’ in-house software that is only described in literature but not released publicly).