Counting milliseconds in streaming data latency may not seem thrilling at first, but software developers ought to pay attention to the use cases ‘event-by-event streaming’ enables, according to George Chow (pictured), senior director of technology at Simba Technologies Inc., a Magnitude Software Inc. company.

“Hitting that new threshold, the millisecond, is actually a very important milestone,” Chow said during an interview at DataWorks Summit in San Jose, California. “What caught my attention is actually how much manufacturing has really … [gone into] streaming data.” Chow said. 

The automobile industry has begun experimenting with streaming data to fine-tune production, Chow told George Gilbert (@ggilbert41), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. (* Disclosure below.)

Just recently, “Both Volkswagen and Audi actually had case studies for how they are actually using streaming data,” Chow said.

Painting a vehicle is a costly step in manufacturing; Audi is building a streaming data model to monitor environmental conditions that may contribute to defects in the process, Chow explained. And Ford Motor Company is also working on streaming data models to improve production.

The closing millisecond window

“… When you look at a typical scenario, let’s say with AdTech where you’re serving ads, you really only have, maybe, on the order of about 100 or maybe 200 millisecond max to actually turn around,” Chow said.

That includes network transfer-time, which means that in the actual budget the allowance is under 10 to 20 milliseconds for compute and all, he explained.

Apache Spark 2.2 or another event-by-event streaming engine that cuts latency to one millisecond or less can allow advertisers to execute within that tiny window, Chow concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of DataWorks Summit. (* Disclosure: Hortonworks Inc. sponsored this DataWorks Summit segment on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither Hortonworks nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

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