Stream processing Frameworks

The most popular stateful stream processing frameworks in the open source space are Apache Flink, Apache Kafka, and Apache Spark – all developed at the Apache Software Foundation and therefore available under the Apache license. All are written in Java or Scala and at home in the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Apache Flink was born as a stream processor. Apache Spark came out of the batch-processing environment and, over time, added stream processing capabilities in the form of processing in micro-batches. Apache Kafka is actually a tool for storing data streams and is very popular as a stream processing source and sink. In recent years, however, Kafka has also been given a number of functions that enable it to operate as a stream processor.

Each stream processing framework has a different programming model, but the tools do have some similarities. For example, all three have programming interfaces (APIs) with varying degrees of expressiveness: from relatively close to the system to more abstract interfaces to languages such as SQL (see the box entitled "Databases and Stream Processing").

01 SELECT
02   p.userid, p.title, p.playTime, COLLECT(DISTINCT i.title) AS impressions
03 FROM
04   Plays p,
05   Impressions i
06 WHERE
07   p.userid = i.userid AND
08   i.impressionTime BETWEEN p.playTime - INTERVAL '1' HOUR AND p.playTime
09 GROUP BY p.userid, p.title, p.playTime

A special class of APIs called stateful functions allow easy and flexible creation of event-based distributed applications that use a stream processor as a substructure but feel comfortable in a serverless environment. A program of this kind is not modeled as a data stream but with stateful functions for each object of the system, where each function can freely interact with others. Programs written with stateful functions can use a number of different programming languages, because the functions use HTTP to communicate with each other and are completely independent of each other. Ververica was one of the first companies to publish a stateful functions API for this type of modeling and programming in the stream processing environment a year ago, and it is now an official component of Apache Flink.

Conclusions

Stream processing has become an important tool for processing as much distributed data as possible in real time. The stream processing paradigm offers an easy approach to creating distributed real-time applications of arbitrary complexity. Open source frameworks help programmers produce correct results and also handle task distribution, network communication, and fault tolerance in the underlying cluster. Stream processing might seem confusing at first glance, especially event time and watermarks, but once you have internalized the various elements, you'll be well on your way to building your own stream processing applications.

In order to make stream processing available to an even wider audience, SQL APIs have already been created to enable software engineers, data engineers, and scientists to benefit from the advantages of integrating a database. These APIs, as well as the ecosystem that surrounds them, are undergoing continuous development.