Reliable and affordable data streaming cloud service

What are data streams?

Streaming data or data streams refers to the stream data created by the users or customers interacting with your application–this abundance of information generated is what is referred to as data streams. This data can range from simple log files generated by users to purchase data, credit card information, sentiment analysis, sensor data, IoT, and much much more. Sometimes this data is streamed in real time, meaning that you’ll get visibility into the data your users create immediately. Cloud providers like DigitalOcean can offer this benefit. Through our compute and database services.

Does any application I build have streaming data?

Not all applications will have streaming data. Streaming data is present in most applications that have active users or customers. Handling so much streaming data from users may require improved batch processing, real time analytics, access to continuous data or historical data, up-to-date streaming data architecture, data lakes, a universal data pipeline, time series data, and many other technical considerations. Using a service like DigitalOcean to handle your streaming data infrastructure can take some of the hassle of managing your stream processing systems away.

How do I know if my application has streaming data?

It is likely your application (or you as the project or business owner) will need to process data, as you’ll want to understand how your visitors, users, customers, etc. are engaging with the technology, site, app, etc. you’ve built. Data management is important for growing a business, and so having easy data access is often top-of-mind for developers or businesses trying to scale.

How do I process raw data?

Data can come in all kinds of types or data records. You can end up collecting system logs, dynamic data, data in real time, and other data types. You’ll typically want to understand all your data sources and have data centers hold the data you collect. DigitalOcean’s products and services can help with data management and help you process data streams or a single data stream.

As far as processing raw data goes, we recommend looking into Apache Hadoop or Apache Spark.

Do I need to process streaming data to be successful?

Every business and project is different. While streaming data, batch processing, real time analytics (or at least data in real time), etc is critical for many businesses, we cannot know what the needs of your business are. Data stream processing is very common among the most successful internet-based companies, so at the very least stream processing is probably worth looking into.

Some internet-based businesses today even have data scientists on staff. Data scientists are engineers wholly dedicated to helping manage and analyze data. Many data scientists today are even skilled in cutting-edge techniques such as machine learning (and applying machine learning algorithms) or using streaming data sensors.

We actually have blog posts and tutorials that cover machine learning topics. Machine learning is an exciting new frontier in data analysis.