The software architectures that drive the web and the enterprise have been quietly upended in recent years. The client-server paradigm, which had been stable for decades, gave way to event-driven microservices, and with them came an entirely new kind of data infrastructure. Streaming has changed the landscape of transactional data, and while legacy ETL has given way to the data lake and cloud-native solutions, analytics has ridden out this wave while keeping stubbornly close to its batch origins. Until now.
Companies like LinkedIn, Uber, Stripe, and many others across the world have found that it’s time for analytics to experience the same transformation that application architectures have. They’ve found that it was never enough merely to generate reports and dashboards for consumption by internal decision makers. Now, to compete for the time, attention, and the business of your users, they need access to that same data. They need instantly generated actionable insights that guide their interaction with the web sites, mobile apps, and services you deploy to them. To compete in the world taking shape right now, your analytics need to join the real-time revolution.
