A scalable architecture for real-time online data access

Abstract

In recent years more and more computer users are getting connected to the Internet. The explosive growth not only provides a wealth of opportunities for building online services, but also poses significant challenges. Handling an ever increasing number of users imposes a careful design of the system. Giving them real-time access to the data complicates even further the implementation of such a service. In this paper a real-time data storage architecture is presented that scales with ease to accommodate an increasing number of clients. The proposed architecture can handle not only predominant read operations, such as when using a traditional database with a caching layer, but also when most of the operations are write operations. By also prioritizing the access to data with respect to the user interactions with the system, the real-time performance of the system is enhanced. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.