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

Lower barrier for building streaming pipelines


Stream processing platforms overall need to become more accessible. Considering how databases today can be accessed from virtually every programming language and with a wide variety of tools, similar support will be needed in the streaming space.

Traditionally, most projects provide their native primary API with the language that they were also written in, which predominantly, in the big data space, is Java or Scala. The resulting level of abstraction may be appropriate for data engineers with a solid background in distributed systems. However, this skillset is not widespread and hard to acquire, resulting in an excessively high entry barrier. There are various trends and efforts to address this, including visual tools, higher level DSLs (domain-specific languages), and more general programming language bindings.

Visual development tools

The bottom of the stack use cases, such as simple data movement or basic ETL, can be addressed with visual development...