This blog post series is inspired by my conference talk Analyze Billions of Rows of Data in Real-Time Using Azure Data Explorer.
In the presentation, I talk about “user-facing” analytics. Historically analytics has been limited to a small set of users in an organization (think the C-suite, power users, etc.). User-facing analytics changes that and makes analytics available to the end-users. An example of “user-facing analytics” is LinkedIn’s: “Who’s viewed your profile”. Another example is leaderboards, which are popular in online gaming.
Since I work for a company (Derivco) that develops systems for the iGaming industry, this series looks at the basics of a real-time leaderboard for online gaming using Kafka and Azure Data Explorer (ADX).
Initially, I thought one post would cover this, but I quickly realized one post covering everything would be way too long. Therefore, I am splitting this topic into multiple posts, and in this post, I look at Kafka and event generation.
Arguably, this first post has little to do with ADX, which is why the title says Prelude😄. Still, it is important because it sets up the publishing mechanism, which can be reused for anything else you want to do.