If you want to go somewhere, goto is the best way to get there.
—Ken Thompson
Most data in the wild is dynamic and has a firm lifecycle: it is created, ingested, analyzed, and then culled or put in cold storage. This lifecycle generally has a strict time budget outside of which it is useless. The time budget for streaming data can be on a millisecond scale. Regardless of latency requirements, the first step is invariably transporting the data to a processing platform while perhaps traversing the entire Internet. Any pipelined architecture can only be as fast as its slowest link. For ...