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Deployment of Low-Latency Solutions in the Cloud

Traditionally, companies with low-latency requirements deployed to bare-metal servers, eschewing the convenience and programmability of virtualization and containerization in an effort to squeeze maximum performance and minimal latency from “on-premises” (often co-located) hardware.

More recently, these companies are increasingly moving to public and private “cloud” environments, either for satellite services around their tuned low-latency/high-volume (LL/HV) systems or in some cases for LL/HV workloads themselves.  

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How Does Kafka Perform When You Need Low Latency?

Most Kafka benchmarks appear to test high throughput but not low latency. Apache Kafka was traditionally used for high throughput rather than latency-sensitive messaging, but it does have a low-latency configuration. (Mostly setting linger.ms=0 and reducing buffer sizes). In this configuration, you can get below 1-millisecond latency a good percentage of the time for modest throughputs.

Benchmarks tend to focus on clustering Kafka in a high-throughput configuration. While this is perhaps the most common use case, how does it perform if you need lower latencies?

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How to Develop Event-Driven Architectures

Last month, I wrote an article on open-source Chronicle Wire that discusses how we could serialize an application’s state into different message formats.

Now in this article, I'm going to look at how we can use open-source Chronicle Queue and Chronicle Wire to structure applications to use event-driven architecture (EDA). EDA is a design pattern in which decoupled components (often microservices) can asynchronously publish and subscribe to events. 

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Low Latency Microservices, a Retrospective

I wrote an article on low latency microservices almost five years ago now. In that time, my company has worked with a number of tier-one investment banks to implement and support those systems. What has changed in that time and what lessons have we learned?

Read this article and learn what we learned after five years of developing and supporting low latency microservices.

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Java: Creating Terabyte Sized Queues with Low-Latency

Queues are often fundamental components in software design patterns. But, what if there are millions of messages received every second and multi-process consumer need to be able to read the complete ledger of all messages? Java can only hold so much information before the heap becomes a limiting factor with high-impacting garbage collections as a result, potentially preventing us from fulfilling targeted SLAs or even halting the JVM for seconds or even minutes.

This article covers how to create huge persisted queues while retaining predictable and consistent low latency using open-source Chronicle Queue.

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Low Latency Edge Data Streaming With Kafka and Cloud-Native 5G Infrastructure

Many mission-critical use cases require low latency data processing. Running these workloads close to the edge is mandatory if the applications cannot run in the cloud. This blog post explores architectures for low latency deployments leveraging a combination of cloud-native infrastructure at the edge, such as AWS Wavelength, 5G networks from Telco providers, and event streaming with Apache Kafka to integrate and process data in motion.

The blog post is structured as follows:

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Ultra Low Latency Video Streaming and 7 Use Cases

Especially with COVID-19, people started to demand more live streams. But especially in some live streams which we will talk about in the rest of the blog post should be really 'live' to satisfy the audience. Let’s start with how popular live streaming is. According to the Cisco Annual Internet Report; Increasing internet connection speeds will enable a higher resolution to live video streaming and live video streaming will become popular in every field.

With the popularity of live streaming, the need for ultra low latency video streaming is increasing day by day.

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Low-Latency Java: Part 1 — Introduction

This is the first article of a multi-part series on low latency programming in Java. At the end of this introductory article, you will have grasped the following concepts:

  • What is latency, and why should I worry about it as a developer?
  • How is latency characterized, and what do percentile numbers mean?
  • What factors contribute to latency?

So, without further ado, let's begin.