Apache Flink vs Apache Spark Streaming comparison

"The product helps us to create both simple and complex data processing tasks. Over time, it has facilitated integration and navigation across multiple data sources tailored to each client's needs. We use Apache Flink to control our clients' installations."

"Apache Flink's best feature is its data streaming tool."

"Apache Flink offers a range of powerful configurations and experiences for development teams. Its strength lies in its development experience and capabilities."

"Apache Flink provides faster and low-cost investment for me; I find it to have low hardware requirements, and it's faster with low code, meaning it's easy to understand for moving the streaming data."

"Easy to deploy and manage."

"Apache Flink is meant for low latency applications. You take one event opposite if you want to maintain a certain state. When another event comes and you want to associate those events together, in-memory state management was a key feature for us."

"It is user-friendly and the reporting is good."

"What I appreciate best about Apache Flink is that it's open source and geared towards a distributed stream processing framework."

"The main benefits of Apache Spark Streaming include cost savings, time savings, and efficiency improvements about data storage."

"Apache Spark Streaming has features like checkpointing and Streaming API that are useful."

"As an open-source solution, using it is basically free."

"With Apache Spark Streaming's integration with Anaconda and Miniconda with Python, I interact with databases using data frames or data sets in micro versions and create solutions based on business expectations for decision-making, logistic regression, linear regression, or machine learning which provides image or voice record and graphical data for improved accuracy."

"The platform’s most valuable feature for processing real-time data is its ability to handle continuous data streams."

"Apache Spark's capabilities for machine learning are quite extensive and can be used in a low-code way."

"The solution is better than average and some of the valuable features include efficiency and stability."

"Apache Spark Streaming was straightforward in terms of maintenance. It was actively developed, and migrating from an older to a newer version was quite simple."

"There are more libraries that are missing and also maybe more capabilities for machine learning."

"In a future release, they could improve on making the error descriptions more clear."

"PyFlink is not as fully featured as Python itself, so there are some limitations to what you can do with it."

"In terms of stability with Flink, it is something that you have to deal with every time. Stability is the number one problem that we have seen with Flink, and it really depends on the kind of problem that you're trying to solve."

"Apache should provide more examples and sample code related to streaming to help me better adapt and utilize the tool."

"The TimeWindow feature is a bit tricky. The timing of the content and the windowing is a bit changed in 1.11. They have introduced watermarks. A watermark is basically associating every data with a timestamp. The timestamp could be anything, and we can provide the timestamp. So, whenever I receive a tweet, I can actually assign a timestamp, like what time did I get that tweet. The watermark helps us to uniquely identify the data. Watermarks are tricky if you use multiple events in the pipeline. For example, you have three resources from different locations, and you want to combine all those inputs and also perform some kind of logic. When you have more than one input screen and you want to collect all the information together, you have to apply TimeWindow all. That means that all the events from the upstream or from the up sources should be in that TimeWindow, and they were coming back. Internally, it is a batch of events that may be getting collected every five minutes or whatever timing is given. Sometimes, the use case for TimeWindow is a bit tricky. It depends on the application as well as on how people have given this TimeWindow. This kind of documentation is not updated. Even the test case documentation is a bit wrong. It doesn't work. Flink has updated the version of Apache Flink, but they have not updated the testing documentation. Therefore, I have to manually understand it. We have also been exploring failure handling. I was looking into changelogs for which they have posted the future plans and what are they going to deliver. We have two concerns regarding this, which have been noted down. I hope in the future that they will provide this functionality. Integration of Apache Flink with other metric services or failure handling data tools needs some kind of update or its in-depth knowledge is required in the documentation. We have a use case where we want to actually analyze or get analytics about how much data we process and how many failures we have. For that, we need to use Tomcat, which is an analytics tool for implementing counters. We can manage reports in the analyzer. This kind of integration is pretty much straightforward. They say that people must be well familiar with all the things before using this type of integration. They have given this complete file, which you can update, but it took some time. There is a learning curve with it, which consumed a lot of time. It is evolving to a newer version, but the documentation is not demonstrating that update. The documentation is not well incorporated. Hopefully, these things will get resolved now that they are implementing it. Failure is another area where it is a bit rigid or not that flexible. We never use this for scaling because complexity is very high in case of a failure. Processing and providing the scaled data back to Apache Flink is a bit challenging. They have this concept of offsetting, which could be simplified."

"The solution could be more user-friendly."

"Apache Flink should improve its data capability and data migration."

"The debugging aspect could use some improvement."

"Integrating event-level streaming capabilities could be beneficial."

"The problem is we need to use it in a certain manner. After that, we need to apply another pipeline for the machine learning processes, and that's what we work on."

"One improvement I would expect is real-time processing instead of micro-batch or near real-time."

"When dealing with various data types including COBOL, Excel, JSON, video, audio, and MPG files, challenges can arise with incomplete or missing values."

"One improvement I would expect is real-time processing instead of micro-batch or near real-time."

"The service structure of Apache Spark Streaming can improve. There are a lot of issues with memory management and latency. There is no real-time analytics. We recommend it for the use cases where there is a five-second latency, but not for a millisecond, an IOT-based, or the detection anomaly-based. Flink as a service is much better."

"The initial setup is quite complex."

"It's an open-source solution."

"It's an open source."

"This is an open-source platform that can be used free of charge."

"The solution is open-source, which is free."

"Apache Flink is open source so we pay no licensing for the use of the software."

"Spark is an affordable solution, especially considering its open-source nature."

"On a scale from one to ten, where one is expensive, or not cost-effective, and ten is cheap, I rate the price a seven."

"I was using the open-source community version, which was self-hosted."

"People pay for Apache Spark Streaming as a service."