The Challenge
Our client needed a dashboard that could ingest millions of financial transactions daily while providing real-time analytics to compliance teams. Legacy batch-processing systems introduced 4-hour delays — unacceptable for regulatory reporting.
Architecture Decisions
We chose a streaming architecture with Apache Kafka for event ingestion, ClickHouse for analytical queries, and a React frontend with WebSocket-powered live updates. Each component was chosen for its ability to handle high throughput with low latency.
Results
The platform now processes 10M+ transactions daily with p99 query latency under 200ms. The compliance team can monitor anomalies in real-time, reducing regulatory risk exposure by 60%.
Lessons Learned
Invest in observability early. When you're processing millions of events, the ability to trace a single transaction through the entire pipeline is invaluable for debugging and optimization.