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

Analyzing Twitter feed


The example we are going to build will show how an application similar to the ad-tech use case can be built using the Apex library. Instead of processing a stream of ad-impression events from Kafka clusters, we will use a stream of tweets retrieved via the Twitter developer API. Instead of a dimensional model, we will compute windowed aggregates for selected metrics. The data visualization will take advantage of Grafana with a Pub/Sub plugin instead of a custom portal and frontend server. The goal will be to introduce the relevant building blocks and enable the reader to derive a similar application for their domain or use case.

The following sections will walk through the application functionality, its components, and a few selected implementation details. The full code, ready to run is available at the following link: https://github.com/tweise/apex-samples/tree/master/twitter.

The following is the DAG of the example application:

The input operator reads tweets from...