Real-Time and Always-On—How Data Streaming Bolsters Reliability in Tech

According to the 2023 Data Streaming Report, 92% of IT leaders in the technology industry cite data streaming as one of their top strategic priorities. But what does that mean in real-world terms? What factors are driving the tech sector to lead the charge when it comes to prioritizing real-time data?

We asked Jonathan Kropp, Director of Architecture at Extend, to get his perspective on this trend.

Why do you think data streaming has become a strategic priority so broadly across the tech industry?

Jonathan: For companies like Extend that straddle the line between being a tech startup and FinTech SaaS, it’s especially important that we provide a seamless customer experience. That often means providing real-time updates and transaction processing, which can be incredibly complicated to implement on the backend.

There’s a lot of competitive pressure to not only provide these real-time experiences, but also to ensure that there’s no interruption in service. Our customers, partners, and investors expect us to keep delivering on what’s called the “3 R’s”—resilience, reliability, and robustness.

So now, the biggest advantage we’re seeing from adopting data streaming is in how it allows us to continue building on our event-driven architecture.?

Doing things the “event-driven way” is something that’s become a central part of our long-term technical vision because keeping our revenue-generating services—the public APIs from which we intake requests—online is critical to our business.?

Standing up an event-driven architecture has allowed us to decouple those mission-critical services from the rest of our platform. If and when there are failures, we aren’t risking the quality of service we provide to the merchants that use and rely on our platform.?

We want to have as high an uptime as possible for any requests coming into our system while still being able to make ongoing improvements to the underlying data infrastructure. I think that’s a priority that’s true of many tech startups in our space.

When issues do arise, we can work behind the scenes to fix the issues without having to disable critical services. And with data streaming in place, when services come back online, the platform can immediately start streaming and processing data, allowing us to quickly catch back up to the current state of things.

These technical and business benefits aren’t exclusive to the tech industry—find out how data streaming is transforming every industry and why it’s an essential part of developing a future-proof data strategy.