31 KiB
Chapter 1. Trade-offs in Data Systems Architecture
There are no solutions, there are only trade-offs. […] But you try to get the best trade-off you can get, and that’s all you can hope for.
Thomas Sowell, Interview with Fred Barnes (2005)
Data is central to much application development today. With web and mobile apps, software as a service (SaaS), and cloud services, it has become normal to store data from many different users in a shared server-based data infrastructure. Data from user activity, business transactions, devices and sensors needs to be stored and made available for analysis. As users interact with an application, they both read the data that is stored, and also generate more data.
Small amounts of data, which can be stored and processed on a single machine, are often fairly easy to deal with. However, as the data volume or the rate of queries grows, it needs to be distributed across multiple machines, which introduces many challenges. As the needs of the application become more complex, it is no longer sufficient to store everything in one system, but it might be necessary to combine multiple storage or processing systems that provide different capabilities.
We call an application data-intensive if data management is one of the primary challenges in developing the application [1]. While in compute-intensive systems the challenge is parallelizing some very large computation, in data-intensive applications we usually worry more about things like storing and processing large data volumes, managing changes to data, ensuring consistency in the face of failures and concurrency, and making sure services are highly available.
Such applications are typically built from standard building blocks that provide commonly needed functionality. For example, many applications need to:
- Store data so that they, or another application, can find it again later (databases)
- Remember the result of an expensive operation, to speed up reads (caches)
- Allow users to search data by keyword or filter it in various ways (search indexes)
- Handle events and data changes as soon as they occur (stream processing)
- Periodically crunch a large amount of accumulated data (batch processing)
In building an application we typically take several software systems or services, such as databases or APIs, and glue them together with some application code. If you are doing exactly what the data systems were designed for, then this process can be quite easy.
However, as your application becomes more ambitious, challenges arise. There are many database systems with different characteristics, suitable for different purposes—how do you choose which one to use? There are various approaches to caching, several ways of building search indexes, and so on—how do you reason about their trade-offs? You need to figure out which tools and which approaches are the most appropriate for the task at hand, and it can be difficult to combine tools when you need to do something that a single tool cannot do alone.
This book is a guide to help you make decisions about which technologies to use and how to combine them. As you will see, there is no one approach that is fundamentally better than others; everything has pros and cons. With this book, you will learn to ask the right questions to evaluate and compare data systems, so that you can figure out which approach will best serve the needs of your particular application.
We will start our journey by looking at some of the ways that data is typically used in organizations today. Many of the ideas here have their origin in enterprise software (i.e., the software needs and engineering practices of large organizations, such as big corporations and governments), since historically, only large organizations had the large data volumes that required sophisticated technical solutions. If your data volume is small enough, you can simply keep it in a spreadsheet! However, more recently it has also become common for smaller companies and startups to manage large data volumes and build data-intensive systems.
One of the key challenges with data systems is that different people need to do very different things with data. If you are working at a company, you and your team will have one set of priorities, while another team may have entirely different goals, although you might even be working with the same dataset! Moreover, those goals might not be explicitly articulated, which can lead to misunderstandings and disagreement about the right approach.
To help you understand what choices you can make, this chapter compares several contrasting concepts, and explores their trade-offs:
- the difference between transaction processing and analytics (“Transaction Processing versus Analytics”);
- pros and cons of cloud services and self-hosted systems (“Cloud versus Self-Hosting”);
- when to move from single-node systems to distributed systems (“Distributed versus Single-Node Systems”); and
- balancing the needs of the business and the rights of the user (“Data Systems, Law, and Society”).
Moreover, this chapter will provide you with terminology that we will need for the rest of the book.
……
Summary
The theme of this chapter has been to understand trade-offs: that is, to recognize that for many questions there is not one right answer, but several different approaches that each have various pros and cons. We explored some of the most important choices that affect the architecture of data systems, and introduced terminology that will be needed throughout the rest of this book.
We started by making a distinction between operational (transaction-processing, OLTP) and analytical (OLAP) systems, and saw their different characteristics: not only managing different types of data with different access patterns, but also serving different audiences. We encountered the concept of a data warehouse and data lake, which receive data feeds from operational systems via ETL. In [Link to Come] we will see that operational and analytical systems often use very different internal data layouts because of the different types of queries they need to serve.
We then compared cloud services, a comparatively recent development, to the traditional paradigm of self-hosted software that has previously dominated data systems architecture. Which of these approaches is more cost-effective depends a lot on your particular situation, but it’s undeniable that cloud-native approaches are bringing big changes to the way data systems are architected, for example in the way they separate storage and compute.
Cloud systems are intrinsically distributed, and we briefly examined some of the trade-offs of distributed systems compared to using a single machine. There are situations in which you can’t avoid going distributed, but it’s advisable not to rush into making a system distributed if it’s possible to keep it on a single machine. In [Link to Come] and [Link to Come] we will cover the challenges with distributed systems in more detail.
Finally, we saw that data systems architecture is determined not only by the needs of the business deploying the system, but also by privacy regulation that protects the rights of the people whose data is being processed—an aspect that many engineers are prone to ignoring. How we translate legal requirements into technical implementations is not yet well understood, but it’s important to keep this question in mind as we move through the rest of this book.
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