Introduction

Building systems that handle millions of events per second while maintaining sub-second latency is one of the greatest engineering challenges of our time. This article explores architectural patterns and trade-offs you must consider.

Key Design Principles

• •Partition Strategy — Distribute load evenly across processing nodes
• •Backpressure Handling — Gracefully manage traffic spikes
• •State Management — Efficiently store and access streaming state
• •Fault Tolerance — Ensure exactly-once or at-least-once semantics
• •Observability — Monitor latency percentiles and throughput in real-time