I have heard about popular term “LAMP” stack. LAMP is an acronym of ‘Linux’ operating system, ‘Apache’ web server, ‘Mysql’ relational database and ‘PHP’ scripting language. LAMP stack is entirely free and open source for enabling dynamic web applications. Recently I got to know a new term called “SMACK” stack.

SMACK

Today we are living in the era of ‘data’. New problems and dependencies with data arises day by day. The amount of data generated by data sources are huge like data from sensors, message queues and logs. Also big data solutions are required in many platforms like e-commerce, IOT and API management. Unlike olden days where data will be processed in batches to get insights and value, modern applications have real time processing built-in.

In data driven world, there is need for technology stack which ingest the data without loss, process it in real time, trigger actions and store data in scale. SMACK stack is a solution to address this.

I would say SMACK stack is a open source set of technologies for powering scalable real-time and data driven applications.

Apache Spark

Apache Spark is a distributed engine for processing data in real time with build in modules like SQL, SparkML and graph processing. I don’t need to explain much about spark. Spark has evolved like anything in data driven world.

Apache Mesos

Apache Mesos is a distributed system kernel for resource management and scheduling across data center for application like Spark, Hadoop, Kafka, Elasticsearch. In short, Mesos is similar to a Linux Kernal.

Apache Akka

Apache Akka is a framework to create distributed, resilient and concurrent applications in Java or Scala. I don’t have much knowledge of Akka.

Apache Cassandra

Apache Cassandra is a distributed NoSql and column based database. Cassandra is a AP system and extremely fast for user queries.

Apache Kafka

Apache Kafka is a distributed message broker for publish-subscribe, stream processing and for building streaming pipelines. Kafka is a widely known message brokers used by various vendors and for various business use cases.