Madison Brown

Data Integration Engineer @ HCA Healthcare

After graduating from Tennessee State University with a Master’s in Computer Science, Madison works on the Waterpark team at HCA healthcare with her former professor. In her free time, she illustrates, animates, and models between digital, 3D, and traditional mediums. She currently lives in Nashville, Tennesse with a roommate in a small apartment that costs too much.

Talk:
Building a Highly Available, Distributed Streaming System Using Only Elixir and The BEAM

HCA’s Waterpark data integration engine is a continuously available streaming system; it’s also a distributed database that never touches disk. Waterpark accomplishes this by utilizing built-in features of Elixir and the BEAM. Each message in the endless streams arriving in Waterpark is routed across the geographically distributed cluster to the relevant actor processes for exactly-once processing without depending on external broker dependencies such as RabbitMQ or Kafka. How does our team build and maintain this unique system? This talk will discuss a few key tools: the Publish-Subscribe Messaging Pattern, micro-batching, queuing theory, and more. You’ll see how we use these tools, along with core BEAM features, to safely and reliably store messages from a publication within our application, until they are sent to a subscriber. And we’ll share the lessons we learned along the way.

TALK OBJECTIVES:

Discuss how to store messages from a publication as part of the Publish-Subscribe model in Elixir and Erlang distributed systems.

TARGET AUDIENCE:

Erlang, Elixir & distributed systems developers