In this chapter, we discussed the problem that Flume is attempting to solve: getting data into your Hadoop cluster for data processing in an easily configured, reliable way. We also discussed the Flume agent and its logical components, including events, sources, channel selectors, channels, sink processors, and sinks. Finally, we briefly discussed Morphlines as a powerful new ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) library, starting with Version 1.4 of Flume.

The next chapter will cover these in more detail, specifically, the most commonly used implementations of each. Like all good open source projects, almost all of these components are extensible if the bundled ones don't do what you need them to do.