The BAM Blog

Sometimes (and most especially it seems in Europe), bad weather can bring a country to a standstill.  Not long ago, some snow fell in Madrid (pretty rare) and resulted in what appeared to be a national emergency including shutting down the airport for a small period.  The following is an email written by one of our guys trapped in Madrid airport.  I post this because it is amusing and well written, and because there is a very tenuous link between event causality and weather prediction.  And context.  This photo from the day will cause several people to question the definition of “Heavy Snow”.  So thanks Nigel!

Heavy Snow at Madrid Airport caused Mayhem

As I enter my 28th hour of captivity I am forming some sort of Stockholm Syndrome affinity with my kidnapper, Madrid Airport. Its really not so bad, there is food (small dried toasts onto which you can drop olive oil for a treat) and even showers (where what looks really like a fan switch in fact called the emergency guy).

Yesterday saw the entire airport shutdown for around 10 hours due to 100 or so snow flakes. When it opened I was lucky enough to get transfered onto the late flight (which ironically was the one I was originally booked onto before changing to the earlier one). So our late flight became later and later – every 15 minutes the board showed it slipping by another 15 minutes. Now the know-it-alls like me know Munich has a very strict midnight curfew for landing. German rules dictate that even if you are plunging from 30000 feet due to engine failure, you will need written permission from the mayor before you are allowed to penetrate the runway like a flying dart. In short, we knew there was no chance of the flight leaving so even though the plane was fueled up and waiting, it was all in vain. Quite pleased I did not get on as I had already spent 3 hours on the morning plane at the gate before being hoofed off due to the snow flake.

The night was fun. I made a bed by pushing two small chairs together which formed a comfy oval cave. I now walk like a hunchback and if lucky will straighten up by Monday. I noticed also that small tribes are forming – I was naturally drawn to the alpha males holding BA Gold Cards and minor tribes such as the Silver Card Holders and ´fresh from the swamp¨ occasional flyers are keeping away from us. If they do not bring something to replace the small toasts, we are considering starting to eat some of the Silver card holders.

So the plan today is I am on a wait list for 8.20. In Spanish ´Wait List´ translates to ´not a hope¨  but it will keep you from being a pain in the butt at the service desk for a couple more hours. As this Wait turns inevitably into disapointment, I am also booked onto a 16.20 which is actually confirmed. So only 10 more hours to go before I might get a flight. I am also considering the train which is 28 hours via Paris but it is hard to call – will I get that 16:20 dream flight home or won´t I ?  I think I will make the call if I miss the 16:20 and should then make it home sometime on Monday by train.

Otherwise I am having a pleasant time. Small diversions like using the toilet at the other end of the airport can kill nearly 50 minutes and I am looking forward to breakfast at McDonalds at 07:00. Its also fun watching the people, the airport is full of people who were here all night and many all day yesterday – there are the enraged, the cool, the up-all-night Redbull folks, sadly many of have kids which is just awful.

If you are wondering why we did not all go to a nice hotel – the roads were closed or extremely slow due to the snow-flake and we were told we were unlikely to get to a hotel before 2 or even 3am.

Planes Scuttling for Cover at Madrid Airport

The only thing that really worries me apart from forgetting what my kids look like is my socks. Over nearly 48 hours of walking, I swear I could see them gently glowing in the night. They redefine the word ´funk´ and I feel they should be sent to Jim and Mort as a record of our absolute committment to the cause.

Just of for a glass of wine for breakfast -  of course there is more booze than water in the lounge.

Twitter provide nice APIs that allow users access to their data. There’s a whole bunch of interesting applications built on top of this data, most of them gimmicks while a few have serious potential. One of the ways of accessing the twitter data is via the Twitter Firehose which is supposed to be the entire stream of “tweets” (tweet is a message on twitter). Unfortunately the firehose is still not open to all users which is a real pity.

Bill de hÓra has a very interesting posting on this topic. There are 2 interesting aspects to Bill’s post:

1. The story behind the firehose and some of the reactions to the fact that Twitter still haven’t given open access to this data.

2. The speculation that the reason for the delay is not so much a business reason but a technical limitation on Twitter’s ability to scale.

If the reason for the delay is that Twitter is protecting the data so they can exploit the value themselves, I wouldn’t be too surprised. To be fair that would be considered the second most valuable thing they have. The most valuable asset is the fact that they have everyone’s attention.

Bill seems to think the issues are technical. Roy Fielding suggests as much when he blogged about Inverse Economies of Scale with PubSub systems. Roy’s solution to the problem of people demanding too much data/events and therefore crippling your service was to charge for the service. That is possibly what Twitter may announce next year.

The technical problems that Roy and Bill discuss are caused by Event and/or Data gluttons. These are users/machines that oversubscribe to events or data services. This is human nature and provides developers with a challenge when building distributed software. Luckily there are a lot of useful patterns and tools available to today’s developers to solve these problems. At WestGlobal we face the challenge of Event Gluttons and we handle it by having a flexible architecture that can be optimised depending on the situation. In general, the approach we take is for a distributed Event Processing Network (EPN) with flexible deployment options. As such, Vantify deployment are layered as follows:

1. The first layer of consumers are our Event Processors who sit closest to the action. These event gluttons are deployed on a network and want to know everything that is happening in your business. These Event Gluttons process events as they happen using CEP and other techniques. The good news for the network is that you don’t need too many of these event processors so over subscription isn’t a problem. They can be distributed almost anywhere on your network and if there is a high volume of data then we can limit the chatter by deploying the processors closer to the events or splitting up the event streams. Although these are very greedy consumers we can satisfy their appetite.

2. The other place where we need to handle event gluttons is at the top layer in our product where real users want to view reports and dashboards about their business. Here we do need to worry about supporting a large number of users. However most of these users are using a browser and polling our data feeds which will scale very well. There will be a limited number of users who want subscriptions in order to be notified. This is where we need to worry about scale but this is typically a small number.

So I think the world is big enough to accommodate Event Gluttons. Thanks to people like Roy and Bill, developers have a lot of tools and techniques available to them to handle scale. The only good reason for restricting data or events should be a business reason. I certainly hope Twitter open up their data and like many others I’ll be watching with interest when they reveal all.

The Event Processing Technical Society (EPTS) has been officially launched, and the website is at http://www.ep-ts.com. A lot of credit has to go to Opher Etzion (http://epthinking.blogspot.com/) for being the main driving force and organizer behind the scenes, but there are lots of other names too that have been involved from the start.

The EPTS is an unusual group by today’s standards. It is made up of a great mixture of individual people and companies from the academic and commercial worlds, and even includes customers and analysts. It has officially met three times, and the fourth meeting will take place later this year. Work has been ongoing for some time now, albeit in the background. As the group gathers momentum, I anticipate a busy number of years ahead.

Brian Connell

CTO

I am delighted to announce the launch of our new BAM Blog. I hope over the coming weeks and months that you find it an excellent resource for cutting edge information and debate on the developments of Business Activity Monitoring.

First let me give you a bit of background information on WestGlobal and why we have started this Blog.

WestGlobal is based in Dublin, Ireland, and over the past number of years we have designed and developed Vantify Experience Centre. Vantify provides enterprises with a real-time insight into the performance of their Business Activities and Customer Experience. The power behind Vantify is driven by our own Complex Event Processing (CEP) engine, a factor which we are confident will be key to the long term success of any enterprise standard BAM solution.

Given the experience that our team has gained from our customer engagements and product development efforts, we hope that the wider BAM and CEP community will benefit from our shared thoughts, ideas and insights.

Well that’s enough of the marketing speak and if you would like to find out more on the product or company feel free to browse through our website www.westglobal.com

Now lets get down to business!!

Patrick Lennon

Chief Executive