In this section, we will give a quick overview of the concepts involved. These concepts will be explained in more detail in the following sections.

At the highest level, we have a planet. A planet consists of a manager, an atmosphere, and one or more flows. The manager is in charge of the planet, and it manages all components and the flows.

A flow contains feed components connected together to handle feeds and provide streams.

At the middle level, a planet is implemented using daemons on different machines. There is one manager daemon in charge of managing the planet. There are one or more worker daemons connecting to the manager, waiting for the manager to tell it to start components.

At the lowest level, everything is done by components. Components are the basic building block of functionality. Some components, called feed components, implement streaming functionality. Other components implement related functionality like authentication and testing.

There are three types of feed components: consumers, producers and converters. Producers produce stream data, converters change it, and consumers consume stream data.

There are various other types of components. A bouncer implements authentication capabilities. A tester can create test clients.

The components are part of a flow. This flow describes the topology of streaming components linked to each other. The flow also can contain some of the other components.