The Red Sift Platform

Serverless computing with Sifts

Red Sift provides a home for a new kind of application, we call it a Sift. You can think of a Sift as a always-on digital agent that will accept your streamed data, process it, and present the things you need to know back to you.
Sifts are implemented as Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs). A DAG consists of independent processing nodes which process and pass data between each other and finally emit result to an output.
Because of this structure, you don't have to configure servers or worry about scalability or reliability, because that is integral to the Red Sift runtime environment.

A platform that speaks your language

At Red Sift we believe in using the right tool for the right job, and Sifts are structured so you can do just that.

There are some great tools out there for workflow automation of discrete events but what Red Sift provides an open platform where you can integrate sophisticated machine learning algorithms or other state of the art technologies and get much more out of your data.

We achieve this by allowing you to implement each node in a Sift in the language of your choice, so Sifts make multi-language, interplatform operation simple. So, you might use one of the great machine learning packages in Python, Scala or R and combine it with the Stanford NLP toolkit in Java, or use Golang utilities.

Email is still our biggest data lake.

Our grand vision starts with a single step. So, we started with email as a concrete example of a large lake of data that every individual and organisation has and struggles with today.
Email Sifts provide automation and insight for your overflowing inbox, but this is just the start. Over the coming months we will be showing what Red Sift means when it is mixed with your Slack channels or IoT devices. If email is today’s data lake, your virtual and physical Bots are probably tomorrows and we aim to solve your data problems across every channel.

Features

Built with security, scalability and simplicity in mind, we take away all of the usual hosting distractions so you can focus on building great Sifts.

• Security: we are a zero knowledge hosting cloud. All the data stored by a Sift is encrypted with a unique key for each user.
• Simplicity: focus on solving problems and not on infrastructure. You can deploy new Sifts directly from Github
• Streaming: first class support for your streaming data sources and streaming computation.
• Scalability: our platform scales with your Sift's data requirements automatically.
• Cost: no setup costs, no hosting costs, no operational costs. Just build great Sifts and make them available to the world. Red Sift will always be free for registered developers.
• Machine Learning: deploy your own machine learning algorithms in our long computation nodes or connect with external deep learning clouds.

Our pledge to you

Our pledge is to make setting up and creating Sifts very simple and that this documentation should be comprehensive. If you feel it is not simple to create a Sift, let us know and we’ll simplify it. If the documentation is incomplete, let us know and we’ll improve it (all our docs have links for you to suggest edits). If you find a bug (as much as we’ll try to make sure there aren't any), let us know and we’ll fix it.

About this documentation

This documentation will help you get started as a Sift developer, we truly believe that the real power of our platform is to enable you, the developer community, to create the types of services that will transform people's interaction with their data into simpler, insightful and delightful experiences.
This documentation is structured to give you an in-depth overview of the key concepts of our platform, the structure of a Sift and how to troubleshoot any issues you might have during development.