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Introduction

Raccoon is high throughput, low-latency service that provides an API to ingest clickstream data from mobile apps; and sites and publish it to Kafka. Raccoon uses the WebSocket protocol for peer-to-peer communication and protobuf as the serialization format. It provides an event-type agnostic API that accepts a batch (array) of events in protobuf format. Refer here for the protobuf definition format that Raccoon accepts.

Overiew

Key Features​

  • Event Agnostic - Raccoon API is event agnostic. This allows you to push any event with any schema.
  • Event Distribution - Events are distributed to Kafka topics based on the event meta-data
  • High performance - Long-running persistent, peer-to-peer connection reduce connection set up overheads. Websocket provides reduced battery consumption for mobile apps (based on usage statistics)
  • Guaranteed Event Delivery - Server acknowledgments based on delivery. Currently, it acknowledges failures/successes. Additionally, users can augment the server for zero-data loss or at-least-once guarantees.
  • Reduced payload sizes - Protobuf based
  • Metrics: - Built-in monitoring includes latency and active connections.

Use Cases​

Raccoon can be used as an event collector, event distributor, and forwarder of events generated from mobile/web/IoT front-ends as it provides a high volume, high throughput, low latency event-agnostic APIs. In addition, it can serve the needs of data ingestion in near-real-time. Some domains where Raccoon could be used are listed below.

  • Adtech streams: Where users can ingest digital marketing data from external sources into the organization backends
  • Clickstream: Where apps can stream user behavior data in real-time
  • Edge systems: Where devices (say in the IoT world) need to send data to the cloud.
  • Event Sourcing: Such as Stock updates dashboards, autonomous/self-drive use cases

Usage​

Explore the following resources to get started with Raccoon:

  • Guides provide information on deployment and client samples.
  • Concepts describe all important Raccoon concepts.
  • Reference contains details about configurations, metrics, and other aspects of Raccoon.
  • Contribute contains resources for anyone who wants to contribute to Raccoon.