Siphon: Streaming data ingestion with Apache Kafka

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Data is at the heart of Microsoft’s cloud services, such as Bing, Office, Skype, and many more. As these services have grown and matured, the need to collect, process and consume data has grown with it as well. Data powers decisions, from operational monitoring and management of services, to business and technology decisions. Data is also the raw material for intelligent services powered by data mining and machine learning. Most large-scale data processing at Microsoft has been done using a distributed, scalable, massively parallelized storage and computing system that is conceptually similar to Hadoop. This system supported data processing using a batch processing paradigm. Over time, the need for large scale data processing at near real-time latencies emerged, to power a new class of ‘fast’ streaming data processing pipelines.

 

Siphon was created as a highly available and reliable service to ingest massive amounts of data for processing in near real-time. Apache Kafka is a key technology used in Siphon, as its scalable pub/sub message queue. Siphon handles ingestion of over a trillion events per day across multiple business scenarios at Microsoft. Initially Siphon was engineered to run on Microsoft’s internal data center fabric. Over time, the service took advantage of Azure offerings such as Apache Kafka for HDInsight, to operate the service on Azure.

 

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Read about it in the Azure blog.

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