Book Image

Building Big Data Pipelines with Apache Beam

By : Jan Lukavský
Book Image

Building Big Data Pipelines with Apache Beam

By: Jan Lukavský

Overview of this book

Apache Beam is an open source unified programming model for implementing and executing data processing pipelines, including Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL), batch, and stream processing. This book will help you to confidently build data processing pipelines with Apache Beam. You’ll start with an overview of Apache Beam and understand how to use it to implement basic pipelines. You’ll also learn how to test and run the pipelines efficiently. As you progress, you’ll explore how to structure your code for reusability and also use various Domain Specific Languages (DSLs). Later chapters will show you how to use schemas and query your data using (streaming) SQL. Finally, you’ll understand advanced Apache Beam concepts, such as implementing your own I/O connectors. By the end of this book, you’ll have gained a deep understanding of the Apache Beam model and be able to apply it to solve problems.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
1
Section 1 Apache Beam: Essentials
5
Section 2 Apache Beam: Toward Improving Usability
9
Section 3 Apache Beam: Advanced Concepts

Chapter 8: Understanding How Runners Execute Pipelines

So far in this book, we have focused on Apache Beam from the user's perspective. We have seen how to code pipelines in the Java Software Development Kit (SDK), how to use Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) such as SQL, and how to use portability with the Python SDK. In this chapter, we will focus on how the runner executes the pipeline. This will help us if we want to develop a runner for a new technology, debug our code, or improve performance issues.

We will not try to implement our own runner in this chapter. Instead, we will focus on the theoretical concepts that underpin runners. We will explore the building blocks of a typical runner, and this will help us understand how a runner executes our user code.

After describing how runners implement the Beam model, we will conclude this chapter with an in-depth description of window semantics and using metrics for observability. Improving observability is key when attempting...