RPI Realtime Architecture

Overview

The following sections describe RPI Realtime’s components.

RPI Realtime API

The RPI Realtime API is an interface that provides functionality such as:

• The management of visitor profiles

• The ability to make content applicability decisions

• The processing of RPI web forms

• The handling of communication with the RPI application server

RPI’s Realtime capabilities are exposed via a website, which provides an API, and, optionally, its associated documentation.

You can access the site by navigating to the RPI Realtime website, either directly within a browser, or using the Browse command in Internet Information Services (IIS).

When you do so, the following web page is displayed:

If enabled, clicking the button in the API Documentation section displays details of the RPI Realtime API’s endpoints.

Realtime Agent Service

The RPI Realtime Agent Service is an http://ASP.Net Web API service which provides the ability to load information from the RPI app server, including:

• Cached attribute lists

• Message history

• Page and decision metadata

• Database connectivity to facilitate usage of the same as a cache

Realtime Cache

The RPI Realtime Realtime cache is used to persist data such as the following:

• Visitor profiles

• Rules as defined in Realtime decisions

• Text content (if published directly from a smart asset)

A variety of technologies can be used to host the Realtime cache, including:

• Memcached

• Redis

• Windows AzureRedisCache

• SAP Hana

• Amazon Elasticache

• Cassandra

• Database

• Couchbase

• MongoDB

• SQL Server

• Ncache

• CosmosDB

• MemoryDB Redis

Queues

RPI Realtime makes use of the following queues, which are used to provide asynchronous connectivity from the RPI Realtime API to the RPI application server:

• Form submission: used to process data submitted in a web form.

• Web events: used to process web events other than form submissions.

• Visitor profile: used to process visitor profile data from the Realtime cache to a database or file.

Each queue has its own matching system configuration setting that must be set appropriately.

Queues can be hosted using a variety of technologies. Queue Providers can be created and managed in a dedicated configuration interface. The following technologies can be used to host RPI Realtime queues:

• Azure Service Bus

• Azure Event Hubs

• Apache ActiveMQ

• Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)

• IBM MQ

• Microsoft Message Queueing (MSMQ)

• RabbitMQ

• Google Pub Sub

• Kafka