AI and Analytics in Production

Chapter 4. Example Data Platform: MapR

You probably didn’t wake up this morning thinking, “I’m gonna get me a global namespace!” But you likely do want the things it can make possible for your production systems. What makes this and other capabilities of a data platform interesting is knowing how they can help in getting systems into reliable production. This isn’t always obvious, especially as new technologies offer features that are just that, new. In this chapter, we describe one example technology: the MapR data platform. Most of the insights we’ve discussed so far, plus the design patterns we describe in the next chapter, are based on watching how people build successful production systems, and this is the platform they used.

Only a few of the design patterns we describe in Chapter 5 absolutely require capabilities unique to MapR, but all of them demonstrate good practice in pushing platform-appropriate functions down to the platform rather than trying to implement them at the application level. That’s an important general lesson regardless of the platform you use.

Understanding how the MapR data platform works will make it easier to see the key ideas in the design patterns. Once you see that, you’ll understand how to adapt them to your own needs. We also think you might find this technology interesting in its own right. Toward that goal, we use the first half of the current chapter to give you a grounding in some key capabilities of the MapR platform in the context of production ...