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by dave_ops 3941 days ago
I don't really understand what the heavy emphasis on "real-time" here.

I mean it's log/event aggregation for ops insight. Unless the whole system is some tightly coupled feedback loop into an unsupervised machine learning model where the whole thing has actual hard-real-time requirements (something which might well be impossible to build), then there's no possible way that having a second or two delay, between a message being created and when you can actually see it, can possibly matter.

I mean you don't have someone with instantaneous reflexes and resolution ability sitting there 24/7 with their eyes peeled as a stream of thousands of log messages flies by.

The whole premise seems spurious. Is it really necessary for every startup and their uncle to delude themselves into thinking that their use case is "mission critical" or "carrier grade" or whatever?

Auth0 provides basically "login as a service". Its not like they're managing the access control to nuclear launch codes or something.

Unless some medical device manufacturer was stupid enough to make a critical surgical assistance device require an internet connection, a WAN round-trip on unreliable networks, and reliance on a 3rd party service in order to start operating it... how can this service being down possibly be anything more than an annoyance? What's the worst possible scenario? A session has to be rebuilt? A user has to make an extra login attempt?

By their own admission the service has gone down already due to the old system architecture. How many babies died?

1 comments

The article is talking about webtask.io, the underlying engine for sandboxed code execution used by Auth0 for allowing customers to extend the platform with arbitrary nodejs code. In such system there is a need to acccess real time logs (think tail -f) while you are debugging your stuff.

Also, the emphasis is not just the real time aspect. The article mentions the issues with kafka for HA

Real time has a technical meaning in software and that's what he is referring to: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_computing

Live updated logs meant for human readability shouldn't need anything hard or soft real-time in the technical sense.

Immediate (in human 'immediate' sense) visibility of a change via what basically is an ETL pipeline absolutely meets the technical meaning of "near-real-time data-processing" as in that the very link. The article meets "real-time ETL" in a very technical sense.