Writing real-time applications is hard; harder still, if it needs to be distributed and fault tolerant. Minimizing latency and optimizing throughput are major goals for such applications. They demand quick response times and positive user experience even in the event of a failure of an external system or a spike in traffic. The legacy approach is to rely on external services, such as databases, queues, etc., to handle concurrent or asynchronous operations. However, this is not viable in many scenarios. Many real-time systems—such as trading or banking applications—cannot afford the long waiting times it takes to handle concurrent requests. (more…)
