This is a guest repost of Ben Stopford's epic post on Elements of Scale: Composing and Scaling Data Platforms. A masterful tour through the evolutionary forces that shape how systems adapt to key challenges.

As software engineers we are inevitably affected by the tools we surround ourselves with. Languages, frameworks, even processes all act to shape the software we build.

Likewise databases, which have trodden a very specific path, inevitably affect the way we treat mutability and share state in our applications.

Over the last decade we’ve explored what the world might look like had we taken a different path. Small open source projects try out different ideas. These grow. They are composed with others. The platforms that result utilise suites of tools, with each component often leveraging some fundamental hardware or systemic efficiency. The result, platforms that solve problems too unwieldy or too specific to work within any single tool.

So today’s data platforms range greatly in complexity. From simple caching layers or polyglotic persistence right through to wholly integrated data pipelines. There are many paths. They go to many different places. In some of these places at least, nice things are found.

So the aim for this talk is to explain how and why some of these popular approaches work. We’ll do this by first considering the building blocks from which they are composed. These are the intuitions we’ll need to pull together the bigger stuff later on.