The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) is an optical time-domain survey that is currently generating about one million alerts each night for transient, variable, and moving objects. The ZTF Alert Distribution System (ZADS; Patterson et al.) packages these alerts, distributes them to the ZTF Partnership members and community brokers, and allows for filtering of the alerts to objects of interest, all in near-real time. This system builds on industry-standard real-time stream processing tools: the Apache Avro binary serialization format and the Apache Kafka distributed streaming platform. It leverages concepts and tools being developed for LSST (Python client libraries), with the source code publicly available on GitHub. This talk will give an overview of the ZTF alert distribution system. We will examine lessons learned from ~six months of operating an LSST precursor alert stream (both from the operator and end-user perspective), discuss opportunities for standardization, and implications for the LSST.
Link to PDF (may not be available yet): O8-2.pdf