Hazelcast Simplifies High-Performance Stream Processing for Edge Computing Environments

Hazelcast Jet delivers real-time data analysis from the edge to the data center and cloud with microsecond performance improvements, simplified deployment options and more

News provided by

Hazelcast, Inc.

May 13, 2020, 09:00 ET

SAN MATEO, Calif., May 13, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Hazelcast, the leading in-memory computing platform, today announced significant optimizations to its real-time event streaming engine, Hazelcast Jet, further establishing it as a premier solution for edge computing environments. In addition to increased platform performance, this release simplifies integrations with Red Hat OpenShift and Kubernetes, as well as the expansion of support for additional transactional sinks.

Whether the use case is the data streaming from a sensor in a manufacturing plant or an autonomous vehicle, the time it takes to process data can mean the difference between success and catastrophic failure. As such, edge computing is about placing compute power as close to the point of data origination as possible to derive value and implement the resulting insights - all within microseconds.

"We view the blink of an eye as a minuscule amount of time, but in reality, it takes 300,000 microseconds," said Kelly Herrell, CEO of Hazelcast. "By placing processing power at the edge and turbocharging it with Hazelcast's ultra-low latency stream processing capabilities, new applications will be enabled that will innovate our business capabilities and improve our daily lives."

Hazelcast continues to establish itself as a critical component of edge architectures. Earlier this month, Hazelcast was announced as an initial, featured member of the IBM Edge Ecosystem. At the center of the ecosystem is the IBM Edge Application Manager which automates and enables the secure and remote management of AI, analytics and IoT workloads, delivering real-time analysis and insight at scale – up to 10,000 devices simultaneously.

Simplified Container Deployments
Expanding on the company's cloud-native and container support, Hazelcast Jet now features two new operators to simplify deployments within containers. Certified by Red Hat and available in the Red Hat Marketplace, the Hazelcast Jet Enterprise Operator for OpenShift is now available. Additionally, the Hazelcast Jet Kubernetes Operator is available for the open source and enterprise versions of the streaming engine.

Small Package, Big Performance
Under the premise of edge computing, sending data back to a data center is not an option as too much latency is introduced into the application. Similarly, sensors and other edge devices are often extremely space-constrained which means traditional databases and other hardware is not a viable option. At less than 15MB, Hazelcast Jet is a lightweight software solution with zero external dependencies which enables enterprises to embed it within the application, eliminating the latency of network hops while leveraging the speed of in-memory technologies.

In the previous release, Hazelcast Jet added the ability to call out to Python routines from within a Jet Pipeline. Now it is possible to invoke external gRPC (Remote Procedure Call) enabled services during the processing of a Jet Pipeline. Introduced by Google and donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), gRPC is a standards-based framework for exposing and calling services. It is now possible to have Jet Pipelines interact with services written in languages other than Java via this mechanism.

"Successful edge solutions cannot rely on distant data centers and cloud services to shoulder the burden of high-volume data processing, increasingly, edge deployments have to take on this role. Not only does this approach reduce latency, but it makes budgetary sense when network costs become prohibitive, especially when sending data to the cloud. Hazelcast Jet has the power to solve this challenge," said David Brimley, chief product officer (CPO) at Hazelcast. "The real-time nature of the edge requires a highly-performant, easily deployed solution and Hazelcast Jet is the only streaming engine on the market with the footprint and performance to handle the data ingestion, transformation and post-processing."

Expanded Support for Sink APIs
Earlier this year, Hazelcast Jet introduced new logic that expanded upon its "exactly-once" guarantee by tracking reads and writes at the source and sink levels to ensure no data is lost or processed more than once when a failure or outage occurs. In the latest release, Hazelcast Jet now supports Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) and Java Message Service (JMS) as new sinks that can participate in the distributed transaction. For systems such as payment processing or e-commerce transaction systems, the "exactly-once" guarantee is critical in avoiding data loss or duplication should a hardware failure occur.

Availability
Hazelcast Jet 4.1 is available for download today.

Additional Resources

Hazelcast Jet 4.1 is Released [Blog]
Hazelcast and IBM Edge-to-Cloud Applications [White Paper]
Hazelcast Gets Edgy: Lowering Latency with IBM Edge Application Manager [Blog]
Success in the 5G edge era calls for a vibrant partner ecosystem [IBM Blog]
Hazelcast Jet: The Ultra-Fast Streaming Framework [Web]

About Hazelcast, Inc.
Hazelcast delivers the in-memory computing platform that empowers Global 2000 enterprises to achieve ultra-fast application performance - at any scale. Built for low-latency data processing, Hazelcast's cloud-native in-memory data store and event stream processing software technologies are trusted by leading companies such as JPMorgan Chase, Charter Communications, Ellie Mae, UBS and National Australia Bank to accelerate data-centric applications.

Hazelcast is headquartered in San Mateo, CA, with offices across the globe. To learn more about Hazelcast, visit https://hazelcast.com.

SOURCE Hazelcast, Inc.