Book Image

Instant Parallel Processing with Gearman

By : John Ewart
Book Image

Instant Parallel Processing with Gearman

By: John Ewart

Overview of this book

Many of today's applications need to be able to process large volumes of data, and vertical scaling has its limits both in terms of prohibitive cost and hardware limits. Gearman is an open source job manager that is well-suited to building horizontally scalable systems, from map-reduce algorithms to simple data processors capable of handling massive amounts of information. Instant Gearman is a practical, hands-on guide to getting started with building an open source job management server system that is built to grow. Learn the basics of building a distributed application that spans multiple components and learn how Gearman fits into building an application that scales from one to hundreds of components that interact to process data. With Gearman, you can build software that scales horizontally as your need for computation increases. Instant Gearman has in-depth examples and a step-by-step approach to building distributed systems, helping you to build systems that are scalable and modular in their approach to processing data. Once you are comfortable with building simple workers and clients, learn how to build a cluster of managers and see how to reduce single-point-of-failure in your architecture. Next, build a simple map-reduce application using Gearman and scale it up from a single instance to multiple parallel processing components.
Table of Contents (7 chapters)

Chapter 1. Instant Parallel Processing with Gearman

Welcome to the Instant Parallel Processing with Gearman. This book has been written to show you all you need to know to get started using Gearman. You will learn the history of Gearman, how to run your own servers, write some scripts to process data, and learn some of the more advanced features of Gearman.

This book contains the following sections:

So, what is Gearman? finds out what Gearman is, why it exists, and what you can do with it.

Quick start – building your first components shows you how to set up your own server and interacts with it with some quick examples in Ruby. This section of the book will cover the core concepts of Gearman to get you on your way as quickly as possible to processing jobs using Gearman.

Top 5 features you need to know about helps you learn how to use Gearman beyond simple job submissions. By the end of this section, you will be able to use Gearman and MapReduce methodologies to process large amounts of data, build a pipeline of complex loosely coupled processes that work together to process data using different languages and libraries, offload long-running and complex data analysis and provide real-time feedback to a frontend application, and utilize job coalescing to distribute results to multiple clients while processing the data only one time.

People and places you should get to know tells us that Gearman, like many other open source projects, has a wealth of online resources available. This section will get you started with a number of links to these resources including code examples, libraries, server implementations, mailing lists, and more.