Book Image

Learning Apache Apex

By : Thomas Weise, Ananth Gundabattula, Munagala V. Ramanath, David Yan, Kenneth Knowles
Book Image

Learning Apache Apex

By: Thomas Weise, Ananth Gundabattula, Munagala V. Ramanath, David Yan, Kenneth Knowles

Overview of this book

Apache Apex is a next-generation stream processing framework designed to operate on data at large scale, with minimum latency, maximum reliability, and strict correctness guarantees. Half of the book consists of Apex applications, showing you key aspects of data processing pipelines such as connectors for sources and sinks, and common data transformations. The other half of the book is evenly split into explaining the Apex framework, and tuning, testing, and scaling Apex applications. Much of our economic world depends on growing streams of data, such as social media feeds, financial records, data from mobile devices, sensors and machines (the Internet of Things - IoT). The projects in the book show how to process such streams to gain valuable, timely, and actionable insights. Traditional use cases, such as ETL, that currently consume a significant chunk of data engineering resources are also covered. The final chapter shows you future possibilities emerging in the streaming space, and how Apache Apex can contribute to it.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Chapter 4. Scalability, Low Latency, and Performance

In traditional (non-distributed) applications, performance optimization is a substantial and ongoing effort—there are often individuals or even small teams dedicated to this effort and a vast array of techniques are employed to achieve the desired effect. These techniques include use of better algorithms, data structures with better performance characteristics, threads to parallelize computation, implementing caches, hoisting loop-invariant computations out of loops, and use of appropriate compiler options.

For distributed applications in general and Apex applications in particular, in addition to all of these techniques, a whole slew of new methods are applicable and will be covered in this chapter. Specifically, we'll cover the following topics:

  • Partitioning and how it works
  • Elasticity, operator state, dynamic scaling, and resource allocation
  • Partitioning toolkit
  • Performance optimizations (chaining of operators, stream locality, operator...