Streaming Data Through Hazelcast Platform Into Snowflake with SnoCast
This is an AArete Digital & Technology insight
In today’s realm of modern data management, Snowflake® stands as a prominent cloud-based data warehousing platform, facilitating the storage, processing, and analysis of extensive data volumes. Yet, an often overlooked but immensely valuable asset for augmenting Snowflake’s capabilities is Hazelcast. Harnessing Hazelcast’s unified real-time data platform for real-time data pipeline management within your data infrastructure empowers organizations to diminish latency and elevate data accessibility for immediate decision-making. Let us further explore the compelling reasons why Hazelcast serves as the ideal solution for your Snowflake data lake, unlocking the full potential of the data residing within Snowflake’s repositories.
Integrating Snowflake, Hazelcast, and SnoCast™, AArete’s proprietary connector that enables real-time data ingestion and extraction, yields a rich array of tangible benefits. These benefits, coupled with AArete’s consulting expertise in profitability improvement, digital, and technology, help balance costs alongside productivity value, lending:
- Real-time decision support
- Seamless scalability
- Low-latency data processing
- Data Enrichment
- Bidirectional data flow
- Enhanced agility
- Cost-effectiveness
- Improved analytics
This comprehensive suite of advantages caters to a wide spectrum of organizational needs, fostering more efficient operations and positioning your organization with a competitive edge in the market.
Hazelcast: Designed for Mission-Critical Applications That Require Real-Time, In-Memory Processing
Snowflake serves as a robust data warehouse designed primarily for fueling large-scale analytics. However, it extends its utility by acting as a definitive source of data for numerous enterprise applications, including operational data processing, thanks to the fast data storage within Hazelcast. Hazelcast’s unified real-time data platform is a compelling blend of in-memory computing, scalability, high availability, machine learning (ML) inference, and real-time event stream processing (ESP) capabilities. In combining multiple technologies into a unified real-time platform for instant action, Hazelcast is an intelligent choice for constructing and managing real-time data pipelines, seamlessly integrated with Snowflake as a single source of truth. The innovative combination not only maximizes your investments, it streamlines intricate supply chain processes, enabling the delivery of exceptional real-time or near-real-time business operations.
Hazelcast’s unified real-time data platform is purpose-built to excel in real-time, mission-critical applications, encompassing a wide range of scenarios such as:
- Algorithmic trading
- Fraud prevention
- AI/ML processing
- IoT automation
- Patient Monitoring
- Supply chain management
- Smart grids and energy trading
- Network monitoring
- Real-time risk assessment
For business users, this means Snowflake, combined with Hazelcast, serves as a versatile resource for both large-scale analytics and real-time data processing to streamline operations and enable instant action across various mission-critical applications.
Enhancing Snowflake with Intelligent Caching, Powered by Hazelcast
Caching is a foundational technique employed to enhance data access speed, and preprocessing, and alleviate the burden on the Snowflake data warehouse. When Hazelcast’s unified real-time data platform is deployed in tandem with Snowflake, organizations can enhance their utilization of Snowflake data by establishing an intelligent caching layer. This layer expedites operational workloads, ensuring near-instant access to vast data repositories, even in the petabyte range. This can be beneficial in various use cases and is especially valuable to financial institutions due to the need for instantaneous access to historical trading data for regulatory compliance and auditing purposes.
By managing mixed workloads, the data cached through Hazelcast can fuel modern, real-time applications, which, in turn, leverage the data residing in Snowflake. In addition, Hazelcast has the capacity to enrich streaming data with cached data, enabling an enriched unified stream output.
Balancing Low Latency and High Availability; One of Hazelcast’s Core Strengths
Low latency and exceptional availability are critical business challenges — challenges that Hazelcast has consistently proven itself capable of handling. Hazelcast’s architectural strength ensures remarkably low read and write latencies, typically clocking in at sub-millisecond speeds, and boasts exceptional robustness. Demonstrating its capabilities, a solitary Hazelcast node has proven itself by efficiently processing 1 billion events-per-second at a 99% latency of 26 milliseconds in a cluster of 45 nodes.
The exceptionally high availability of Hazelcast’s unified real-time data platform translates into tangible value for architects, executives, and C-suite professionals. The vigilant monitoring and automatic failover capabilities of Hazelcast’s cluster members ensure that critical business operations remain uninterrupted, even in the face of network failures or other unforeseen events. This reliability and resilience in data access provides executives with a fortified shield against potential risks/losses and helps maintain continuity with minimal disruptions. Hazelcast’s high availability supports the overall stability and reputation of the business, aligning perfectly with the strategic objectives of executive leadership.
A Snowflake and Hazelcast Power Combo: Seamlessly Accommodating Growing Workloads
The scalability exhibited by Snowflake and Hazelcast is of paramount importance to organizations facing the challenges of rapidly growing data volumes. As data continues to surge, the ability to effortlessly scale without compromising performance or requiring extensive application changes is invaluable. Hazelcast’s Auto Scaling Cluster offers a critical advantage by automating the detection of data partitions and adjusting scaling as needed, ensuring each node retains knowledge of all other nodes’ data, enabling lightning-fast, single-hop data retrieval regardless of the cluster’s or dataset’s size. In practical terms, organizations can maintain high-performance data processing and access even as their data requirements expand, supporting efficient operations, timely decision-making, and improved user experiences.
How Hazelcast Can Enhance Snowflake
Enterprises are harnessing the capabilities of Hazelcast to successfully enrich the capabilities of Snowflake. Among these, the financial services sector has witnessed substantial advantages by implementing connectors, such as AArete’s proprietary SnoCast™, facilitating real-time data ingestion. Additionally, they can reap the rewards of “read-through” data, optimizing applications that require multiple iterations of game data by streamlining it through the fast data store of the Hazelcast unified real-time data platform.
Another area of notable progress is in the real-time enrichment of multiple data sources within the platform, offering accelerated and cost-effective computing to generate the data required by applications and users. While various use cases exist, the most significant enhancements have materialized in the fields of IoT, healthcare, and financial services.
Case study: Top Global Financial Services Company Looks to Process Cached Market Data Into Snowflake.
To better understand the business value, let us zero in on a prominent global financial services firm that effectively managed its real-time market data challenges with AArete’s implementation support, leveraging AArete’s SnoCast™ connector, and harnessing Hazelcast’s capabilities. This comprehensive, integrated solution facilitated two-way data flow, allowing real-time market data to seamlessly integrate with their Snowflake data lake, ensuring both scalability and consistent low-latency processing. Additionally, the company leveraged Hazelcast’s versatile functions to enrich the market data with valuable insights drawn from other data sources within their ecosystem. This transformation resulted in the company’s traders and analysts receiving enriched insights quicker, thereby capturing a ‘first-mover’ advantage from the competition, as well as enhancing operational efficiency within the dynamic financial landscape.
SnoCast™-Enabled Solutions for Measurable Results
The Snowflake, Hazelcast, and AArete SnoCast™ combination presents a compelling solution for organizations seeking a streamlined flow of data into and out of Snowflake.
Snowflake’s robust cloud-native architecture provides a secure and scalable foundation for data warehousing and analytics. Hazelcast enhances this ecosystem by offering lightning-fast, in-memory data processing capabilities, high availability, and seamless scalability.
Ultimately, AArete’s SnoCast™ is a vital connector, enabling real-time data ingestion and extraction, creating a bidirectional data flow that empowers organizations to leverage Snowflake’s data assets for real-time decision support and advanced analytics. The product value of Hazelcast and Snowflake not only offers the speed and scale needed for today’s data-driven organizations but also the agility to adapt to evolving data requirements, making it an ideal choice for organizations looking to maximize the potential of their Snowflake data ecosystem. Coupled with AArete’s consulting expertise in digital and technology and profitability improvement, organizations are positioned to yield those technical benefits elevating operational performance and reducing risk while sustaining manageable costs.
Learn more about AArete’s experience and work with Hazelcast or our Financial Services Soultions
