From Scaling Nightmare to Stream Dream : Real-time Stream Processing at Scale

Kafka Summit SF 2017 | Pipelines Track

On the events pipeline team at New Relic, Kafka is the thread that stitches our micro-service architecture together. We receive billions of monitoring events an hour, which customers rely on us to alert on in real-time. Facing a ten fold+ growth in the system, learn how we avoided a costly scaling nightmare by switching to a streaming system, based on Kafka. We follow a DevOps philosophy at New Relic. Thus, I have a personal stake in how well our systems perform. If evaluation deadlines are missed, I loose sleep and customers loose trust. Without necessarily setting out to from the start, we’ve gone all in, using Kafka as the backbone of an event-driven pipeline, as a datastore, and for streaming updates to the system. Hear about what worked for us, what challenges we faced, and how we continue to scale our applications.

	Amy Boyle Software Engineer, New Relic