Distribution, Data, Deployment: Software Architecture Convergence in Big Data Systems

Exponential data growth from the Internet, low-cost sensors, and high-fidelity instruments have fueled the development of advanced analytics operating on vast data repositories. These analytics bring business benefits ranging from Web content personalization to predictive maintenance of aircraft components. To construct the data repositories underpinning these systems, rapid innovation has occurred in distributed-data-management technologies, employing schemaless data models and relaxing consistency guarantees to satisfy scalability and availability requirements. These big data systems present many challenges to software architects. Distributed-software architecture quality attributes are tightly linked to both the data and deployment architectures. This causes a consolidation of concerns, and designs must be closely harmonized across these three architectures to satisfy quality requirements.