Typesafe Empowers Klout to Overcome Big Data Challenges with Real-Time Data Aggregation
Customer Company Size
Mid-size Company
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- Typesafe Platform
- Play Framework
- Akka
- Scala
Tech Stack
- Scala
- Play Framework
- Akka
- Node.JS
- Objective-C
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Digital Expertise
- Innovation Output
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms
- Analytics & Modeling - Big Data Analytics
Applicable Industries
- Software
- Professional Service
Applicable Functions
- Product Research & Development
- Business Operation
Use Cases
- Edge Computing & Edge Intelligence
- Remote Asset Management
Services
- Software Design & Engineering Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
Klout is a company dedicated to empowering individuals by measuring their influence across various social networks. The company provides insights into how users impact their connections and helps them understand their influence. As social networks evolve, Klout continuously updates its analytical methods to integrate new features and understand new communication methods. The company initially offered a web-based interface for users to interact with its services. However, in 2012, Klout decided to expand its reach into the mobile application market, necessitating a significant upgrade to its existing infrastructure. Klout's mission is to unlock the influence of every person by providing them with tools to measure and understand their impact on social networks.
The Challenge
Klout faced a significant challenge in expanding its services into the mobile application market. The existing infrastructure, which was primarily based on PHP servers and Java-based applications, needed modernization to support the new mobile applications and partner-based applications. The key goal was to unify the platform and upgrade the technology to ensure a guaranteed level of performance as the platform scaled. This required re-architecting the infrastructure to meet scalability and consistency demands. The engineering team had to find a solution quickly due to aggressive delivery schedules, and they needed a platform that could handle real-time data aggregation across several social networks and data stores.
The Solution
Klout chose the Typesafe Platform, which includes the Play Framework and Scala, to address its infrastructure challenges. The Play Framework is known for its lightweight, stateless architecture that supports highly scalable applications with minimal resource consumption. Scala, a programming language that integrates functional and object-oriented paradigms, was chosen for its elegance and conciseness. The combination of these technologies met Klout's requirements for a unified platform that could handle real-time data aggregation. Klout's new architecture involved using Iteratees for data collection, which allowed for parallel and asynchronous processing of data streams. This approach enabled Klout to efficiently handle large volumes of user-generated content across multiple social networks. The API was initially launched with Play 1.x and later migrated to Play 2.0, which offered additional benefits by being built natively in Scala. Klout also expanded its use of the Typesafe Platform to include Akka, a toolkit for building highly concurrent, distributed, and fault-tolerant applications. Akka's Actors provided an elegant way to express business logic without the complexities of Java concurrency. The use of Futures in Play allowed Klout to efficiently compose results from multiple data store lookups, meeting their massive scalability requirements.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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