Beyond Batch Processing: Towards Real-Time and Streaming Big Data

Today, big data is generated from many sources and there is a huge demand for storing, managing, processing, and querying on big data. The MapReduce model and its counterpart open source implementation Hadoop, has proven itself as the de facto solution to big data processing. Hadoop is inherently designed for batch and high throughput processing jobs. Although Hadoop is very suitable for batch jobs but there is an increasing demand for non-batch processes on big data like: interactive jobs, real-time queries, and big data streams. Since Hadoop is not proper for these non-batch workloads, new solutions are proposed to these new challenges. In this article, we discuss two categories of these solutions: real-time processing, and stream processing for big data. For each category, we discuss paradigms, strengths and differences to Hadoop. We also introduce some practical systems and frameworks for each category. Finally, some simple experiments are done to show effectiveness of some solutions compared to available Hadoop-based solutions.