I Heart Logs

Book excerpt: Why a book about logs? That’s easy: the humble log is an abstraction that lies at the heart of many systems, from NoSQL databases to cryptocurrencies. Even though most engineers don’t think much about them, this short book shows you why logs are worthy of your attention. Based on his popular blog posts, LinkedIn principal engineer Jay Kreps shows you how logs work in distributed systems, and then delivers practical applications of these concepts in a variety of common uses—data integration, enterprise architecture, real-time stream processing, data system design, and abstract computing models. Go ahead and take the plunge with logs; you’re going love them. Learn how logs are used for programmatic access in databases and distributed systems Discover solutions to the huge data integration problem when more data of more varieties meet more systems Understand why logs are at the heart of real-time stream processing Learn the role of a log in the internals of online data systems Explore how Jay Kreps applies these ideas to his own work on data infrastructure systems at LinkedIn