Alex covers the key architectural decisions and challenges encountered during the design and implementation of a reactive data platform that is able to fulfill several business use cases, ranging from real-time data ingestion to analysis, at massive scales. Pluralsight's current implementation consists of discrete microservices running on top of the JVM, using a mixture of Scala, Akka, Spark, and Kafka. Alex shares Pluralsight's event-driven, reactive design that leverages REST, Hypermedia, and several open source frameworks and platforms, including Spring, Hadoop, YARN, Kafka, Storm, and Spark. Topics include: - The major architectural components of the platform - Leveraging Kafka's distributed commit log for message persistence and event sourcing. - Integrating real-time and batch data pipelines using Spark - Designing event-driven protocols in Scala using Akka - Asynchronous remote communication between services and actors - Binary message serialization protocols - Data-integration challenges
