Towards a unified ingestion-and-storage architecture for stream processing

Big Data applications are rapidly moving from a batch-oriented execution model to a streaming execution model in order to extract value from the data in real-time. However, processing live data alone is often not enough: in many cases, such applications need to combine the live data with previously archived data to increase the quality of the extracted insights. Current streaming-oriented runtimes and middlewares are not flexible enough to deal with this trend, as they address ingestion (collection and pre-processing of data streams) and persistent storage (archival of intermediate results) using separate services. This separation often leads to I/O redundancy (e.g., write data twice to disk or transfer data twice over the network) and interference (e.g., I/O bottlenecks when collecting data streams and writing archival data simultaneously). In this position paper, we argue for a unified ingestion and storage architecture for streaming data that addresses the aforementioned challenge. We identify a set of constraints and benefits for such a unified model, while highlighting the important architectural aspects required to implement it in real life. Based on these aspects, we briefly sketch our plan for future work that develops the position defended in this paper