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Steffen's Blog

Field Engineer @ Materialize

Making it Easier to Build Connectors with Apache Flink: Introducing the Async Sink

Apache Flink is a popular open source framework for stateful computations over data streams. It allows you to formulate queries that are continuously evaluated in near real time against an incoming stream of events. To persist derived insights from these queries in downstream systems, Apache Flink comes with a rich connector ecosystem that supports a wide range of sources and destinations. However, the existing connectors may not always be enough to support all conceivable use cases.

One sink to rule them all: Introducing the new Async Sink

Next time you want to integrate with a new destination for a demo, concept or production application, the Async Sink framework will bootstrap development, allowing you to move quickly without compromise. In Flink 1.15 we introduced the Async Sink base (FLIP-171), with the goal to encapsulate common logic and allow developers to focus on the key integration code. The new framework handles things like request batching, buffering records, applying backpressure, retry strategies, and at least once semantics.

Best practices for right-sizing your Apache Kafka clusters to optimize performance and cost

Apache Kafka is well known for its performance and tunability to optimize for various use cases. But sometimes it can be challenging to find the right infrastructure configuration that meets your specific performance requirements while minimizing the infrastructure cost. This post explains how the underlying infrastructure affects Apache Kafka performance. We discuss strategies on how to size your clusters to meet your throughput, availability, and latency requirements. Along the way, we answer questions like “when does it make sense to scale up vs.

Performance Testing Framework for Apache Kafka

The tool is designed to evaluate the maximum throughput of a cluster and compare the put latency of different broker, producer, and consumer configurations. To run a test, you basically specify the different parameters that should be tested and the tool will iterate through all different combinations of the parameters, producing a graph similar to the one below. https://github.com/aws-samples/performance-testing-framework-for-apache-kafka/

Flink Improvement Proposal 171: Async Sink

Apache Flink has a rich connector ecosystem that can persist data in various destinations. Flink natively supports Apache Kafka, Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, Elasticsearch, HBase, and many more destinations. Additional connectors are maintained in Apache Bahir or directly on GitHub. The basic functionality of these sinks is quite similar. They batch events according to user defined buffering hints, sign requests and send them to the respective endpoint, retry unsuccessful or throttled requests, and participate in checkpointing.