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Google Cloud Dataflow vs Apache Spark: What are the differences?
What is Google Cloud Dataflow? A fully-managed cloud service and programming model for batch and streaming big data processing. Google Cloud Dataflow is a unified programming model and a managed service for developing and executing a wide range of data processing patterns including ETL, batch computation, and continuous computation. Cloud Dataflow frees you from operational tasks like resource management and performance optimization.
What is Apache Spark? Fast and general engine for large-scale data processing. Spark is a fast and general processing engine compatible with Hadoop data. It can run in Hadoop clusters through YARN or Spark's standalone mode, and it can process data in HDFS, HBase, Cassandra, Hive, and any Hadoop InputFormat. It is designed to perform both batch processing (similar to MapReduce) and new workloads like streaming, interactive queries, and machine learning.
Google Cloud Dataflow and Apache Spark are primarily classified as "Real-time Data Processing" and "Big Data" tools respectively.
Some of the features offered by Google Cloud Dataflow are:
- Fully managed
- Combines batch and streaming with a single API
- High performance with automatic workload rebalancing Open source SDK
On the other hand, Apache Spark provides the following key features:
- Run programs up to 100x faster than Hadoop MapReduce in memory, or 10x faster on disk
- Write applications quickly in Java, Scala or Python
- Combine SQL, streaming, and complex analytics
Apache Spark is an open source tool with 22.5K GitHub stars and 19.4K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Apache Spark's open source repository on GitHub.
Uber Technologies, Slack, and Shopify are some of the popular companies that use Apache Spark, whereas Google Cloud Dataflow is used by Spotify, Resultados Digitais, and Handshake. Apache Spark has a broader approval, being mentioned in 266 company stacks & 112 developers stacks; compared to Google Cloud Dataflow, which is listed in 32 company stacks and 8 developer stacks.
We have a Kafka topic having events of type A and type B. We need to perform an inner join on both type of events using some common field (primary-key). The joined events to be inserted in Elasticsearch.
In usual cases, type A and type B events (with same key) observed to be close upto 15 minutes. But in some cases they may be far from each other, lets say 6 hours. Sometimes event of either of the types never come.
In all cases, we should be able to find joined events instantly after they are joined and not-joined events within 15 minutes.
The first solution that came to me is to use upsert to update ElasticSearch:
- Use the primary-key as ES document id
- Upsert the records to ES as soon as you receive them. As you are using upsert, the 2nd record of the same primary-key will not overwrite the 1st one, but will be merged with it.
Cons: The load on ES will be higher, due to upsert.
To use Flink:
- Create a KeyedDataStream by the primary-key
- In the ProcessFunction, save the first record in a State. At the same time, create a Timer for 15 minutes in the future
- When the 2nd record comes, read the 1st record from the State, merge those two, and send out the result, and clear the State and the Timer if it has not fired
- When the Timer fires, read the 1st record from the State and send out as the output record.
- Have a 2nd Timer of 6 hours (or more) if you are not using Windowing to clean up the State
Pro: if you have already having Flink ingesting this stream. Otherwise, I would just go with the 1st solution.
Please refer "Structured Streaming" feature of Spark. Refer "Stream - Stream Join" at https://spark.apache.org/docs/latest/structured-streaming-programming-guide.html#stream-stream-joins . In short you need to specify "Define watermark delays on both inputs" and "Define a constraint on time across the two inputs"
Pros of Google Cloud Dataflow
- Unified batch and stream processing5
- Autoscaling4
- Fully managed3
- Throughput Transparency1
Pros of Apache Spark
- Open-source60
- Fast and Flexible48
- Great for distributed SQL like applications8
- One platform for every big data problem8
- Easy to install and to use6
- Works well for most Datascience usecases3
- In memory Computation2
- Interactive Query2
- Machine learning libratimery, Streaming in real2
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Cons of Google Cloud Dataflow
Cons of Apache Spark
- Speed3
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