Every software application can be divided into two types, namely: compute-intensive applications and data-intensive applications. And then there are applications that fall somewhere between the two. This book focuses on data-intensive applications, and we have just gained an understanding of the data ecosystem in Chapter 1, Exploring the Data Ecosystem.

This chapter will give you an insight into a reference architecture for a data-intensive system and will then try to provide you with a variety of possible implementations of that framework in different scenarios.