As custodians and builders of the streaming platform at Grab operating at massive scale (think terabytes of data ingress each hour), the Coban team’s mission is to provide a NoOps, managed platform for seamless, secure access to event streams in real-time, for every team at Grab.
Streaming systems are often at the heart of event-driven architectures, and what starts as a need for a simple message bus for asynchronous processing of events quickly evolves into one that requires a more sophisticated stream processing paradigms. Earlier this year, we saw common patterns of event processing emerge across our Go backend ecosystem, including:
- Filtering and mapping stream events of one type to another
- Aggregating events into time windows and materializing them back to the event log or to various types of transactional and analytics databases
Generally, a class of problems surfaced which could be elegantly solved through an event sourcing1 platform with a stream processing framework built over it, similar to the Keystone platform at Netflix2.
This article details our journey building and deploying an event sourcing platform in Go, building a stream processing framework over it, and then scaling it (reliably and efficiently) to service over 300 billion events a week.
