How to Read

How to Read This Guide

You do not read this guide front to back. It is organized by topic so you can find things, but almost no one needs all of it. What you read depends on what you are here to do - and the routes below are deliberately short. Pick the one that matches your role, follow it in order, and treat everything else as reference you dip into when a specific need arises.

The sidebar is the full topic map. This page is the role-specific routes through it. If you are not sure which role fits, start with New here and branch out.

---

New here / evaluating

You want to see what Elastic MDS is and watch it work, before committing to anything deeper.

1. Home - what Elastic MDS is, in two minutes.
2. Quick Start - stand up a consolidated deployment with a simulator and watch data flow end to end.

That is the whole first look. Once it clicks, branch into the role below that matches what you will actually do.

---

Application developer

This is most readers. You are writing an application that consumes content - prices, chains, whatever your business needs - and you do it through the standard APIs you already know: JMS, JDBC, and SQL. There is very little that is MetaFluent-specific to learn; the one concept that matters is the MarketData context - how a topic name maps to the content behind it.

1. Quick Start - run the sample subscriber against a live deployment first, so you have something concrete.
2. JMS Application Development - the MarketData context and the topic model, on top of the plain javax.jms API. (Prefer SQL? JDBC Application Development gives you the same content through JDBC and a subset of SQL-92.)
3. Worked Example: SimpleSubscriber - a complete subscriber, walked through section by section.
4. Dynamic Data Conventions - how images, updates, and status messages arrive, and how to read them.

Optional: Entitlements Context - only if your application must enforce access control on behalf of its own users. Most applications never need it.

---

Operator

You bring a deployment up and keep it healthy.

1. Quick Start - the shortest path to a running system.
2. Deployment: Basics - deployment projects, base images, and bringing a deployment up. (Running natively instead of in Docker? Deployment: Without Docker.)
3. Configuration: Basics - setting values and seeing what is actually in effect. (Modes and environment substitution: Configuration: Advanced.)
4. Operations: Monitoring & Diagnostics - is it healthy, which part is not, and why.
5. Operations: Logging - querying the logs across the deployment.
6. Operations: Troubleshooting & FAQ - symptom to cause to remedy. In an emergency, start here.
7. Security: Basics - REST/admin access, the cluster machine secret, and keeping the gateway on a trusted network; see Access Control for client authentication and entitlements.

The REST API is the control and management interface behind the monitoring queries - reach for it when you want to script a check or build your own tooling.

---

Architect

You decide the topology, how resilient it must be, how it is networked, and how it is secured.

1. Architecture: Basics - the core model: services, adapters, projectors, the control plane, and the component-state lifecycle.
2. Architecture: Advanced - the deployment topologies, active/standby, auto-scaling, slow-consumer protection, and topology-based isolation.
3. Deployment: Basics then Deployment: Advanced - the deployment model, and the networking that decides whether clients can reach it (bind vs advertise, flat vs segmented, substrate by substrate).
4. Access Control then Security: Basics - client authentication and the entitlements (authorization) framework, then the operational security surfaces (REST/admin access, cluster secret, transport).

The REST API is the control-plane to use if you are integrating monitoring or building tooling around a deployment.

---

Already a MetaFluent v5 user

Your application code is fully compatible and runs unchanged. The new MarketData context unlocks new content and capabilities when you want them.

1. JMS Application Development - the MarketData context and the topic syntax it introduces.

From there, follow the Application developer path above - everything you already know still applies.

---

Looking for something specific?

You want to...	Go to
Get content into an application	JMS / JDBC
Stand up a running system	Quick Start / Deployment: Basics
Figure out why something is wrong	Troubleshooting
Understand how a piece works	Architecture: Basics / Architecture: Advanced
Look up a term	Glossary

Every term used across the guide is defined in the Glossary.