Learn more about how Ab Initio can help your organization rapidly build sophisticated real-time systems:
Highlights
Real-Time Streaming
Scalable, performant, real-time streaming technology.
A unified processing platform that enables batch, streaming, and service-based architectures underlies all of Ab Initio’s technology. This platform provides a high performance, scalable, and distributed foundation for all your digital applications in the cloud or on premises. All applications, regardless of type, are expressed graphically as a data flow graph — a pipeline of processing components connected by flows. Once executed, the data records flow through the graph and are transformed and routed by the components.
This data processing model is inherently streaming-based — all the components are active in memory while at the same time forming a high performance processing pipeline. What changes between the different compute models is the checkpoint-restart model; for streaming applications, each component saves state on a certain frequency (for example, a time interval or the number of records processed).
This means that it is easy to build high-throughput, distributed, streaming applications that are also reliable with exactly-once guarantees. Data can be streamed in and out of the graph in any format and from any source, including change data capture and all common messaging systems. For example, our customers use the Ab Initio platform to stream and process millions of records per second from communication networks, IoT devices, and web clicks.
Case Studies
API Orchestration — Corralling the Wild Microservice
How do you coordinate microservices without creating a new monolithic code base?
One of the world’s largest banks processed payments on a very large, powerful, and monolithic COBOL system. The system mostly worked. It was fast and it could process a lot of transactions per second, but it had an unfortunate tendency to lose some transactions.
The bank needed a large staff to track the transactions and find the lost ones. The system was very difficult to modify. Constant changes in the payment industry — combined with the bank’s legacy technology and architecture — meant that there was no practical way to keep the payment system current. The bank realized that they needed to modernize their payment system.
The new system needed to handle many complex business transactions, with fast time to market. It needed to provide high availability, and be extremely efficient, traceable, and easy to monitor. It needed to handle failed transactions and error cases, and never lose a transaction. It needed to run in containers on any cloud and on premises, with elastic scalability. And it needed to maintain interfaces to the bank’s legacy systems.
Fortunately, they decided to work with Ab Initio.
Ab Initio technology makes it easy to connect virtually anything to anything. Working with Ab Initio, the bank developed a powerful, microservice-based payment authorizations gateway that takes full advantage of Ab Initio’s speed and scalability. It can call microservices built using different technologies and running in different environments whether on premises or in the cloud. And the legacy interfaces allow the bank to continue to benefit from their existing IT infrastructure.
The payment gateway is fully containerized and elastic. The bank can change the configuration at will with no code changes, going from on premises to the cloud to hybrid mode as needed. The new system also provides the bank extensive monitoring capabilities for successful and unsuccessful transactions. Throughput is extremely high. The new system doesn’t lose transactions, saving the bank countless hours of effort and expense. Adding new transaction types is extremely easy. Ab Initio automatically manages error handling and other standard functionality. The small amount of new functionality can be easily constructed in Ab Initio’s intuitive rule development environment.
The new system enables the bank to significantly improve customers’ experience and loyalty, and it enhances the bank’s reputation as an industry leader.
A fully scalable, elastic system that takes advantage of the latest technologies and makes it easy to add new transaction types — and no more lost transactions: Ab Initio technology at work.