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

Checkpointing


Checkpointing is the mechanism to save the state of the application to make it recoverable in the event of failure. Apex saves snapshots of the state periodically, and can use them for recovery. Checkpointing state is not a new concept; many systems have the concept of state saving that can be used for recovery.

However, since Apex executes as a distributed system with operators in different worker containers, the mechanics of state saving involves subtleties that go well beyond conventional checkpointing so that it results in a consistent snapshot that allows the application to continue after some or all of those containers have failed. This bookkeeping complexity is not something that the application developer should have to deal with; it should be handled by the platform behind the scenes. So, what is the magic of checkpointing in Apex?

There are several pieces to this, and before we come to the actual details of how data is saved to a durable storage, we will look at the...