Apache Flink is a framework and distributed processing engine for stateful computations over unbounded and bounded data streams. Flink has been designed to run in all common cluster environments, perform computations at in-memory speed and at any scale. And FlinkCEP is the Complex Event Processing (CEP) library implemented on top of Flink. Users can detect event patterns in streams of events.
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Apache Spark
Score 8.9 out of 10
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Apache Flink
Apache Spark
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Apache Flink
Apache Spark
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Community Pulse
Apache Flink
Apache Spark
Considered Both Products
Apache Flink
Verified User
Engineer
Chose Apache Flink
Apache Spark is more user-friendly and features higher-level APIs. However, it was initially built for batch processing and only more recently gained streaming capabilities. In contrast, Apache Flink processes streaming data natively. Therefore, in terms of low latency and …
In well-suited scenarios, I would recommend using Apache Flink when you need to perform real-time analytics on streaming data, such as monitoring user activities, analyzing IoT device data, or processing financial transactions in real-time. It is also a good choice in scenarios where fault tolerance and consistency are crucial. I would not recommend it for simple batch processing pipelines or for teams that aren't experienced, as it might be overkill, and the steep learning curve may not justify the investment.
Well suited: To most of the local run of datasets and non-prod systems - scalability is not a problem at all. Including data from multiple types of data sources is an added advantage. MLlib is a decently nice built-in library that can be used for most of the ML tasks. Less appropriate: We had to work on a RecSys where the music dataset that we used was around 300+Gb in size. We faced memory-based issues. Few times we also got memory errors. Also the MLlib library does not have support for advanced analytics and deep-learning frameworks support. Understanding the internals of the working of Apache Spark for beginners is highly not possible.
Python/SQL API, since both are relatively new, still misses a few features in comparison with the Java/Scala option
Steep Learning Curve, it's documentation could be improved to something more user-friendly, and it could also discuss more theoretical concepts than just coding
If the team looking to use Apache Spark is not used to debug and tweak settings for jobs to ensure maximum optimizations, it can be frustrating. However, the documentation and the support of the community on the internet can help resolve most issues. Moreover, it is highly configurable and it integrates with different tools (eg: it can be used by dbt core), which increase the scenarios where it can be used
1. It integrates very well with scala or python. 2. It's very easy to understand SQL interoperability. 3. Apache is way faster than the other competitive technologies. 4. The support from the Apache community is very huge for Spark. 5. Execution times are faster as compared to others. 6. There are a large number of forums available for Apache Spark. 7. The code availability for Apache Spark is simpler and easy to gain access to. 8. Many organizations use Apache Spark, so many solutions are available for existing applications.
Apache Spark is more user-friendly and features higher-level APIs. However, it was initially built for batch processing and only more recently gained streaming capabilities. In contrast, Apache Flink processes streaming data natively. Therefore, in terms of low latency and fault tolerance, Apache Flink takes the lead. However, Spark has a larger community and a decidedly lower learning curve.
Spark in comparison to similar technologies ends up being a one stop shop. You can achieve so much with this one framework instead of having to stitch and weave multiple technologies from the Hadoop stack, all while getting incredibility performance, minimal boilerplate, and getting the ability to write your application in the language of your choosing.