Since we first released Answers seven months ago, we’ve been thrilled by tremendous adoption from the mobile community. We now see about five billion sessions per day, and growing. Hundreds of millions of devices send millions of events every second to the Answers endpoint. During the time that it took you to read to here, the Answers back-end will have received and processed about 10,000,000 analytics events.

The challenge for us is to use this information to provide app developers with reliable, real-time and actionable insights into their mobile apps.

At a high level, we guide our architectural decisions on the principles of decoupled components, asynchronous communication and graceful service degradation in response to catastrophic failures. We make use of the Lambda Architecture to combine data integrity with real-time data updates.

In practice, we need to design a system that receives events, archives them, performs offline and real-time computations, and merges the results of those computations into coherent information. All of this needs to happen at the scale of millions events per second.

Let’s start with our first challenge: receiving and handling these events.

Read in full here:

This thread was posted by one of our members via one of our news source trackers.