What if, as a core business requirement, you found you needed to provide for the capture of data from disconnected operations, such that updates might be made by different parties at the same time—or in overlapping time—without conflicts? And what if your service called for you to receive massive volumes of data almost continuously throughout the day such that you couldn’t really afford to interrupt data ingest at any point for fear of finding yourself so far behind present state that there would be virtually no way to catch up? Theo Schlossnagle, Founder and CTO of Circonus, found himself in this position.
In the ACM Queue Case Study, “Always-On Time-Series Database: Keeping Up Where There’s No Way to Catch Up,” Theo discusses how he built his own time-series database for Circonus, an organization that performs telemetry analysis on an already large and exponentially growing number of IoT (Internet of Things) devices. Attendees were invited to download and read the case study, consider the challenges and lessons learned by Theo and Circonus, and bring their questions to the live talk, which was based on questions from attendees.
Theo Schlossnagle founded Circonus in 2010 and continues to be its principal architect. After earning undergraduate and graduate degrees from Johns Hopkins University in computer science, he went on to research resource allocation techniques in distributed systems during four years of post-graduate work. In 1997, Theo founded OmniTI, which has established itself as the go-to source for organizations facing today’s most challenging scalability, performance, and security problems. He was also the principal architect of the Momentum MTA, which is now the flagship product of Sparkpost, an innovation that is transforming the email software spectrum. A widely respected industry thought leader, Theo is the author of Scalable Internet Architectures (Sams), contributor to Web Operations and Seeking SRE (O’Reilly), and a frequent speaker at worldwide IT conferences. Theo is a member of the IEEE and a Distinguished Member of the ACM. He serves as co-chair of ACM Queue and holds the elected position of ACM Member at Large (2018-2022).
