Scaling up Apama

Apama provides services for real-time matching on streams of events against hundreds of different applications concurrently. This level of capacity is made possible by the advanced matching algorithms developed for Apama’s event correlator component.

Should it prove necessary, capacity can further be increased by using multiple event correlators. To facilitate such multi-process deployments, Apama provides features to enable routing of events to multiple event correlators, possibly running on different host computers, and to assist in the configuration of scaled-up topologies.

There are two methods of configuration: using the advanced configuration tools or programmatically through a client programming API. This guide describes both approaches, but first discusses different ways in which Apama can be distributed and what factors affect the choice of the distribution strategy.

Note: This topic focuses on scaling Apama for applications written in EPL, although the same techniques and tools can be used for Apama Java applications. Knowledge of aspects of EPL is assumed, specifically monitors, spawning, listeners and channels. Definitions of these terms can be found in Getting Started with Apama EPL in Developing Apama Applications in EPL (available if you selected Developer during installation).

The core event processing and matching service offered by Apama is provided by one or more event correlator processes. In a simple deployment, Apama comprises a single event correlator connected directly to at least one input event feed and output event receiver. Although this arrangement is suitable for a wide variety of applications (the actual size depending on the hardware in use, networking etc. available), for some high-end applications it may be necessary to scale up Apama by deploying multiple event correlator processes to partition the workload across several processors and/or machines.