You could build a highly scalable event streaming platform, but Keen beat you to it

To undertake building an event streaming API is a significant “ask” for any development team. Yet,  a solution for capturing, analyzing and leveraging data in real-time is the bedrock on which many business decisions are (or should be) taken. While the total cost of ownership of putting just such a facility in place is significantly high, the business possibilities are immeasurably positive. Every byte of information flowing through an application becomes a resource waiting to be utilized.

Businesses are increasingly aware that with every interaction pretty much now digital, the multiple touchpoints between companies, its partners and suppliers, and its customers, provide a rich source of information. It seems a simple task to connect into multiple APIs internal and external, provide some webhooks, and a little compute, and the solution is there to be grabbed.

The overhead associated with data stream aggregation and processing needn’t be assumed to be so high. Building a capture engine that parses and queries data built on Apache Kafka, Storm and Cassandra has just those capabilities. But constructing something that works seamlessly, has easy interoperability, simple interfaces, SDKs for multiple languages, and is a resilient tool for DevOps, NetOps, CyberSec, and the business — that’s no quick and simple task.

Here’s where the Keen suite of offerings comes into play. It uses recognized open-source applications to   stream data from anything with a network connection, enrich the data with powerful pre-built libraries, and safely stores it. From there, the platform can undertake fast, powerful queries that are constructed to draw out the information you need quickly via a RESTful API.

That sort of multi-capability built ready-made in a cloud platform can prove its worth in a significant number of roles across the IT gamut. NetOps, security, operations, systems administration: each of these discrete areas can address the data in ways that are tuned to their requirements. And access levels can be as granular or broad brush as desired.

There is a great deal that’s simply taken care of. There’s intelligent query cache-ing and built-in transformations that can happen on-the-fly undertaken by Keen Compute. This is built on Storm, DynamoDB, Redis, and AWS Lambda, so powerful capabilities like complex filtering can be done under the hood, with results surfaced via the ten or more SDKs for a range of languages — and therefore a broad range of uses.

If you want the full picture, full form extraction requests are available and are fulfilled quickly in .csv or JSON, so if you need mass data output, it’s yours.

The Data Visualization Library is also a place where the Keen engineering team has been active. It seamlessly connects with the Keen API to easily prototype and ship production-ready, embeddable visualizations.  Keen’s analytics will also work happily with just about any charting  libraries you have at present. Both options are perfect for internal stakeholders and customers, either as extensions or value-adds to existing apps or as integral parts of new applications.

All of this capability is available and delivered via the Keen cloud platform, ready for use at any stage of the DevOps process, or be leveraged by any part of the technology stack.

While businesses and organizations today accrue a great deal of data, some or all of it may be sensitive. The Keen platform is capable of subdividing repositories effectively using privilege sets, so a single repository can act as a secure source of specific data without having to export it to different stores for each use-case (although, of course, that is eminently possible if necessary). Role-based access controls present data without having to change your security policies, and Access Keys allow specific subsets of data to be available to customers, internal stakeholders, or at any level of privilege.

As you might expect, proving GDPR-compliance is made simple, and all data is AES encrypted and available through secure HTTPS and TLS.

With so much heavy lifting done behind the scenes, the Keen platform’s immediate accessibility and power will make it an invaluable part of your IT stack, as indispensable to Security teams as it is to the production of new internal and customer-facing applications. And its openness and extensibility mean that apps and services will be quick to reach production and capable of using the rich resources that organizations possess in their data streams, multiple events, and informational flows.

To try out  Keen , there’s a full-featured 30-Day Trial  plan to spin up for free. Or arrange a demo with a representative.

Get started for free today with Keen.