In Chapter 1, Overview and Architecture, we talked about tiering your data flows. There are several reasons for you to want to do this. You may want to limit the number of Flume agents that directly connect to your Hadoop cluster, to limit the number of parallel requests. You may also lack sufficient disk space on your application servers to store a significant amount of data while you are performing maintenance on your Hadoop cluster. Whatever your reason or use case, the most common mechanism to chain Flume agents is to use the Avro source/sink pair.
We covered Avro a bit in Chapter 4, Sinks and Sink Processors, when we discussed how to use it as an on-disk serialization format for files stored in HDFS. Here, we'll put it to use in communication between Flume agents. A typical configuration might look something like this:
To use the Avro source, you specify the type property with a value of avro. You need to provide a bind address and port number to listen...