Summary

Anomaly detection is a capability that is useful in a variety of problem domains, including finance, internet of things, and systems monitoring. Scaling the volume of events that can be processed in real-time can be challenging, so Paul Brebner from Instaclustr set out to see how far he could push Kafka and Cassandra for this use case. In this interview he explains the system design that he tested, his findings for how these tools were able to work together, and how they behaved at different orders of scale. It was an interesting conversation about how he stress tested the Instaclustr managed service for benchmarking an application that has real-world utility.

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• Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Paul Brebner about his experience designing and building a scalable, real-time anomaly detection system using Kafka and Cassandra

Interview

• Introduction
• How did you get involved in the area of data management?
• Can you start by describing the problem that you were trying to solve and the requirements that you were aiming for?
  • What are some example cases where anomaly detection is useful or necessary?
• Once you had established the requirements in terms of functionality and data volume, what was your approach for determining the target architecture?
• What was your selection criteria for the various components of your system design?
  • What tools and technologies did you consider in your initial assessment and which did you ultimately converge on?
    • If you were to start over today would you do any of it differently?
• Can you talk through the algorithm that you used for detecting anomalous activity?
  • What is the size/duration of the window within which you can effectively characterize trends and how do you collapse it down to a tractable search space?
• What were you using as a data source, and if it was synthetic how did you handle introducing anomalies in a realistic fashion?
• What were the main scalability bottlenecks that you encountered as you began ramping up the volume of data and the number of instances?
  • How did those bottlenecks differ as you moved through different levels of scale?
• What were your assumptions going into this project and how accurate were they as you began testing and scaling the system that you built?
• What were some of the most interesting or unexpected lessons that you learned in the process of building this anomaly detection system?
• How have those lessons fed back to your work at Instaclustr?

Contact Info

• LinkedIn
• @paulbrebner_ on Twitter

Parting Question

• From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?

Links

• Instaclustr
• Kafka
• Cassandra
• Canberra, Australia
• Spark
• Anomaly Detection
• Kubernetes
• Prometheus
• OpenTracing
• Jaeger

The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA