2015-02-17T23:01:50,220 INFO [chief-wikipedia] io.druid.server.coordination.BatchDataSegmentAnnouncer - Announcing segment[wikipedia_2013-08-31T00:00:00.000Z_2013-09-01T00:00:00.000Z_2013-08-31T00:00:00.000Z] at path[/druid/segments/localhost:8084/2015-02-17T23:01:50.219Z0]
Druid offers an additional method of ingesting streaming data via the indexing service. You may be wondering why a second method is needed. Standalone real-time nodes are sufficient for certain volumes of data and availability tolerances. They pull data from a message queue like Kafka or Rabbit, index data locally, and periodically finalize segments for handoff to historical nodes. They are fairly straightforward to scale, simply taking advantage of the innate scalability of the backing message queue. But they are difficult to make highly available with Kafka, the most popular supported message queue, because its high-level consumer doesn’t provide a way to scale out two replicated consumer groups such that each one gets the same data in the same shard. They also become difficult to manage once you have a lot of them, since every machine needs a unique configuration.
Druid solved the availability problem by switching from a pull-based model to a push-based model; rather than Druid indexers pulling data from Kafka, another process pulls data and pushes the data into Druid. Since with the push based model, we can ensure that the same data makes it into the same shard, we can replicate data. The [indexing service](Indexing-Service.html) encapsulates this functionality, where a task-and-resources model replaces a standalone machine model. In addition to simplifying machine configuration, the model also allows nodes to run in the cloud with an elastic number of machines. If you are interested in this form of real-time ingestion, please check out the client library [Tranquility](https://github.com/metamx/tranquility).
Getting data into Druid can definitely be difficult for first time users. Please don't hesitate to ask questions in our IRC channel or on our [google groups page](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/druid-development).