Security monitoring and threat response has diverse processing demands on large volumes of log and telemetry data. Processing requirements span from low-latency stream processing to interactive queries over months of data. To make things more challenging, we must keep the data accessible for a retention window measured in years. Having tackled this problem before in a massive-scale environment using Apache Spark, when it came time to do it again, there were a few things I knew worked and a few wrongs I wanted to right.
We approached Databricks with a set of challenges to collaborate on: provide a stable and optimized platform for Unified Analytics that allows our team to focus on value delivery using streaming, SQL, graph, and ML; leverage decoupled storage and compute while delivering high performance over a broad set of workloads; use S3 notifications instead of list operations; remove Hive Metastore from the write path; and approach indexed response times for our more common search cases, without hard-to-scale index maintenance, over our entire retention window. This is about the fruit of that collaboration.
Dominique Brezinski is a member of Apple's Information Security leadership team and principal engineer working with the Threat Response org. He has twenty five years experience in security engineering, with a focus on intrusion detection and incident response systems design and development. Dom has been working with Apache Spark in production since the 0.8 release.
Michael Armbrust is committer and PMC member of Apache Spark and the original creator of Spark SQL. He currently leads the team at Databricks that designed and built Structured Streaming and Databricks Delta. He received his PhD from UC Berkeley in 2013, and was advised by Michael Franklin, David Patterson, and Armando Fox. His thesis focused on building systems that allow developers to rapidly build scalable interactive applications, and specifically defined the notion of scale independence. His interests broadly include distributed systems, large-scale structured storage and query optimization. [daisna21-speakers]