MapR helps developers leverage analytics with microservices

With an eye toward helping developers operationalize analytics through converged data applications, MapR Technologies today announced support for event-driven microservices on its Converged Data Platform at Strata + Hadoop World in New York City. For administrators, the company is also rolling out comprehensive monitoring with a cluster-wide view of microservices.

“Microservices is basically a way to drive agility and a way for developers to address the integration of operations and analytics — real-time analytics,” says Jack Norris, senior vice president of Data and Applications at MapR.

“One of the hardest problems when creating and developing microservices for an enterprise is the data,” Robin Bloor, chief analyst and co-founder of  research firm Bloor Group, added in a statement today. “How it is shared, managed, protected and delivered is a major constraint to the successful creation and deployment of applications, particularly real-time and mission-critical applications. The key is to combine operations with analytics processing.”

The new capabilities promise simplified development of microservices applications and other converged application development on the platform. Norris notes they give developers the freedom to combine file, database, document and streaming analytics functionality, and a single line of code to persist complex data types with JSON in MapR-DB.

The power of convergence

“Microservices by themselves are great, but don’t deliver on their full promise until you have a converged platform that brings the data together,” Ani Gadre, senior vice president, product management, MapR, said in a statement today. “We’ve made it easier for developers to build innovative new converged data applications that can help transform a business by providing a competitive advantage that was not possible before.”

MapR customer Altitude Digital provider of a programmatic digital advertising platform, is a case in point. It needs to make fast decisions on what ads to play, maximize the probability that ads will be watched, and discard traffic caused by bots (e.g., fraud) before it hits the exchange.

“As one of the fastest-growing video advertising technology companies in the world, we depend on our ability to quickly develop enhancements and deliver data agility to our customers,” Altitude Digital CTO Manny Puentes said in a statement Tuesday. “Event-driven microservices provide a critical capability to help us be more agile, adapt quickly and drive value to our customers.”

What’s new?

To support event-driven microservices, MapR has added several new capabilities to its Converged Data Platform, including the following:

• Comprehensive monitoring of cluster-wide operations and resource usage in a single pane of glass view.
• Microservices-specific volumes for application versioning, simplifying the development lifecycle and production deployment.
• Microservices for A-B and multibvariate testing, enabling rapid machine learning model development and optimization.

The company has also released a Converged Application Blueprint to help organizations speed the development of innovative applications. The blueprint includes application source code to demonstrate how microservices combine to form a converged application that captures high-speed streaming data, persists the data for historical analysis and provides real-time analytics.

Norris notes microservices support is now available in the MapR Converged Community and Enterprise Editions.