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Apache Flink

  • What it is
    • An open-source engine for stateful stream processing — continuous computation over unbounded event streams, with batch as a special case.
  • What makes it distinctive
    • Event-time processing with watermarks, so out-of-order and late events are handled correctly.
    • Managed application state with checkpointing for exactly-once semantics.
    • Windowing (tumbling, sliding, session) for aggregations over time.
  • Where it runs on AWS
    • Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink — serverless Flink applications over streams, formerly Kinesis Data Analytics. See Amazon Kinesis.
    • Amazon EMR when you want to operate the cluster yourself.
  • Exam signal
    • “Real-time analytics on a stream”, “windowed aggregation”, “anomaly detection as data arrives” → Managed Service for Apache Flink.

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