Why Streaming Architecture is a Game Changer: 4 Major Benefits

Let’s start by saying Streaming Architecture, hereinafter referred to as SA, is a kind of a design principle. A way of translating things that happen in a business environment into business events. Obviously not all types of events, but those related to business processes and flows. Take, for example, a company department that deals with Customer Relationship Management. They regularly have to add new customers to their database, check when credit limitations are exceeded or change delivery addresses if required. All these kinds of actions occur in normal business language, everyone understands this. Such operations should therefore be translated into events and used in the SA framework. If not, applications or reporting tools need to be developed to process this data, which is enormously time-consuming and not quite efficient. In case the customer department wants to know for example the amount of clients that have exceeded their credit limitations, and there is no use of SA, history changes need to be checked and expenditure must be added up. When SA is applied, an event is published immediately when the limit is exceeded. For short, things can be monitored at all times and in all places.

Another huge advantage of Streaming Architecture consists in the fact behaviour is not analysed afterwards but at the moment it occurs. Real-time data processing is way too often related to situations in which tons of  data is processed. But this need not necessarily be the case. The idea of processing things in batches and reacting to it retroactively, is getting increasingly difficult because of time constraints. On top the damage has already been done in most cases.

Let’s take another example, in this scenario a mail order company. In the event that the pickup zone is overloaded, and the workforce is insufficient to process all the deliveries, people will get notified. In Streaming Architecture language,  a business event is created which expresses the exceeding of the human capacity. One can react to it immediately, and see if employees from other units can be deployed to solve this problem.

So, Streaming Architecture enables real-time behaviour analysis. Instead of using a traditional approach of thinking in stages, ‘plan – do – check – adjust’, the response is now very quick.  You don’t have to wait until the ‘do’ phase is done. You can plan, execute and check at the same time.