Early October 2019, 6 EURA NOVA engineers travelled to Berlin to attend the Flink Forward Conference, dedicated to Apache Flink users and stream processing communities.

In this article, they will give you their opinion about Ververica’s’ main announcement, the impact of Ververica acquisition by Alibaba, the big trends, and a selection of their favourite talks.

Alibaba!

This is the first Flink Forward conference since the acquisition of Ververica (formerly known as data Artisans) by Alibaba, which has been one of the largest users of Flink and second-largest contributor for years. Our R&D director Sabri Skhiri says: “The only significant impact of this acquisition on the conference is that the venue is now at the Berlin Business Center instead of the Kulturbrauerei. There, we could see that the Apache Flink user’s community has grown significantly as well as their commits on Flink. This edition was a bit more business and enterprise-oriented than previous ones, although it still had its technical DNA and a lot of technical talks. All in all, this was a very good mix. Alibaba folks are deeply committed to open source and creating technology impact. We saw a lot of activities from them such as the integration of the Blink SQL runner, the hive integration or the new scheduling model. In summary, a great event.”

First Keynote Announcement

Keynote: Stream Processing and Applications in the Modern Age (Stephan Ewen)

During the first keynote, Ververica took the opportunity to announce the launch of Stateful Functions (statefun.io), an open-source framework built on top of Flink to run stateful serverless functions. It bridges the gap between Function as a Service and stream processing.

Sabri says: ”Last year, they announced their streaming ledger that brings ACID transactions between states to stream processing applications. This year, they announced the launch of Stateful Functions, a framework that reduces the complexity of building and orchestrating stateful applications at scale. In the streaming world, this announcement does not change a lot of things. However, in the microservice community, this opens new doors in terms of design patterns, especially in the way data feeding and stateful operations can be designed more flexibly.”

You can find the video of the presentation here.

The Big Trends

1. Unified batch and streaming

A significant trend of this edition is the “Unified Stream and Batch” moto. Our R&D engineer Syrine Ferjaoui says: “Flink currently features different APIs, the DataSet API for batch processing and the DataStream API for stream processing. In addition, the Table API is already a unified API on top of both (DataSet and DataStream) with declarative-style programming. Now, they are working on a solution to unify truly the batch and streaming APIs.”

Sabri adds: “In Flink 1.9, they released the State API with which a state created in batch can be used in a stream application – interesting for bootstrapping/backfilling states. But the community is going further by proposing in Flink 2.0 a unique Data API that will merge DataSet and DataStream while still taking advantage of the batch properties to optimise the execution.”

Every talk was exploring in a way or another how this unification can be pushed forward. For instance, in the Pulsar talk, they were thinking about using Pulsar as a back end to transparently bootstrap a state and then switch on stream using (1) pulsar capability in terms of segment storage and (2) unified data stream API in Flink.”

2.”Enterprise-grade” Flink:

Flink is moving clearly toward an “enterprise-grade” technology. Sabri says: “The first signal is that Cloudera adopted Apache Flink into its Data Platform. Also, AWS Kinetics now integrates Flink as a client. Adoption by such big players goes to show that Flink is well on the way to gain enterprise-grade support. The second signal is the release of the Ververica Platform that highly facilitates enterprise-grade operations. Thirdly, the integration of the Hive Metastore with the pluggable catalogue architecture is a significant step towards better governance and metadata management. Finally, there were many talks about lowering the barrier to deploying Flink in prod. The topics included APIs, configuration, memory management, K8S operators, etc.”

3.The ML path

Finally, regarding ML/AI, there is still a lot of work to get over the gap with the Spark ecosystem. However, the Alibaba folks are working hard on this topic and we can already see the first results. Sabri says: “The refactoring of the Flink ML interface to work on Flink Table APIs is excellent. There is an excellent vision of integrating Flink as a data prep engine for ML and serving layer; and the roadmap looks great.”

Interesting talks

A personal selection by Charles & Christophe of interesting talks to check out :

For Charles, our data architect:

• Aljoscha Krettek & Timo Walther, respectively a co-founder at Ververica and a PMC member of Apache Flink work on the Flink APIs. They give a summary of recent contributions to Flink’s Table & SQL APIs. It was a very good overview of what is going on in terms of refactoring and where we are going.
• Roman Grebennikov is a software developer from Findify AB. His talk focused on Flink serialisation framework and common problems happening around it. He illustrated and explained several ways to optimise Flink jobs by taking care of the serialisation, which in most cases represents about 60% of the processing.

For Christophe, our software engineer:

• Konstantin Klauf is the head of product for the Ververica Platform based on Apache Flink. He discussed Apache Flink worst practices by sharing anecdotes and hard-learned lessons of adopting distributed stream processing. It was a humorous list of general good practices when working with Flink from planning, requirement, deployment, and maintenance.
• Aaron Levin and Mike Mintz are software engineers in a Stripe’s streaming team. They talked about the many challenges they encountered writing the specialised dual source. This talk was a very well-told story about a simple use case with a high constraint: all-time deduplication of transactions at Stripe (a payment platform‎). It was funny, insightful, full of lessons learned and echoed some of digazu’s features: the history replayer.

Last month, our R&D engineer Anas Albassit and director Sabri Skhiri travelled to Germany to attend and present at DEBS 2019, one of the most specialised conferences in Distributed Event-Based Systems. DEBS has a long history: from active databases to streaming engines, distributed publish-subscribe systems, etc. it has always been the pioneer of distributed and high-performance systems. In this article, Anas and Sabri share with us what they learned there and what struck them as particularly useful.

Big Trends

This edition focused around streaming language, scheduling, elasticity, distributed event processing, platform and middleware. Our R&D director Sabri Skhiri says: “For someone working in distributed computing and data management, DEBS is one of the major conferences with SIGMOD and VLDB. Even though it is quite small (80 participants vs 1000 for IEEE Big Data), this is a niche conference of experts from a small yet amazingly talented community of researchers. The keynotes were just great, with a good balance between pure research and industry. This conference tackling distributed computing and streaming is heaven for data scientists and architects like us!”

Keynotes

Open Problems in Stream Processing: A Call To Action (Tyler Akidau)

Tyler Akidau is the technical lead for the Data Processing Languages & Systems group at Google. He argues that, even though stream processing has gone from niche to mainstream, this is just the beginning. For him, the need for active exploration of new ideas is all the more pressing. Sabri reacts: “The stream has been there for 30 years. We have Spark, Flink, Dataflow, KStream, MSF Trill. But is it all we can do? Is there nothing to do anymore? Tyler Akidau brilliantly presented that stream processing as a field of research is alive and well.”

The talk was mainly about raising opened or partially opened questions in the streaming world.

• Firstly, the evolution of a pipeline over time may require changes in the persisted state. In that case, how to gracefully update everything online without stopping the working pipeline? How can we auto tune or auto build optimised systems? Do we need to rethink the way we build such systems now?
• Secondly, Tyler Akidau moved on the importance of SQL in streams and the missing parts to fill there. One of the main topics was the mathematical formalisation of streaming operators, in addition to providing richer standards and clarifying the ambiguities coming from the nature of the streams like out of order events and latency.
• The next point focused on the tradeoff triangle between latency, costs and correctness. How to figure out what do we need? How to describe correctly every term from a system-behaviour point of view? Is it possible to prioritise different factors depending on the urgency of some task (e.g. streaming v.s batch) automatically?
• Last but not least, how can we improve stream processing? What kind of database optimisations can be adopted here, and can we think of more optimisations that can only apply on streams?

Tyler Akidau concluded by pointing out that even though streaming systems are more capable and robust than ever, they often remain difficult to use, difficult to maintain, and difficult to understand.

[EDIT] Thank you Tyler for reaching out and for sharing your slide with us! They are available on the following link. If you would like to discuss more insights from the talk, do not hesitate to contact our researchers at research@euranova.eu.

Interesting Papers

STRETCH: Scalable and Elastic Deterministic Streaming Analysis with Virtual Shared-Nothing Parallelism (Hannaneh Najdataei)

Hannaneh Najdataei, Researcher and PhD Student at the Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, presented her framework STRETCH.

Anas explains: “The performance of a streaming engine depends on the throughput and latency of stateful analysis. To achieve the best performance, we need to process a large amount of data (i.e. to be scalable) while handling fluctuations in data rate (i.e. to be elastic). Distributed processing requires the ability to parallelise the processing elastically. Optimally, we should reduce the number of parallel operators when the workload decreases and add operators when more resources are needed. For stateful operators, elasticity reconfigurations require to redistribute the states according to the new cluster configuration (i.e. less or more operators). In this case, we need to find a tradeoff between a share-nothing and a share-all state architecture.”

Sabri adds: “The paper proposes STRECH, a virtual share-nothing parallelism concept that does not require state transfer. The idea is that all workers read the same sequence of input tuples through an intra-node streaming framework. What is surprising in this paper is the parallelism model: all workers get the same sequence of tuples to guarantee the deterministic execution of the stream. On the contrary, in streaming, you usually have a distribution of your tuples per key. Still, they have obtained impressive results matching the throughput and latency figures of the front of state-of-the-art solutions, while also achieving fast elastic reconfigurations.”

To know more about the STRETCH framework, you can find the slides of the presentation here and the paper here.

Uncertainty-Aware Event Analytics over Distributed Settings (Nikos Giatrakos)

Nikos Giatrakos is a PhD researcher from the Technical University of Crete. He presented his work to do uncertainty-aware event analytics. Sabri reacts: “Getting high performance by sampling the input stream and sacrificing a bit of the result precision is the new trend in research. The idea is to parse only some of the events to be able to handle a bigger load, but still controlling the level of uncertainty you have on the result. I see 2 great applications: (1) get approximated results when needed but also (2) proactive detection before events happen.”

While the idea of filtering by controlling the probability of the error is not new, the paper had several novel points:

• The decomposition of the error into filters from a pattern matching query
• The conditional probability assertion for a wide range of aggregation functions
• A central coordinator for calculating the global PDF and then detecting the pattern

To know more about his paper, you can find the slides of the presentation here and the paper here.

LEAD: A Formal Specification For Event Processing (Anas Al Bassit)

On the fourth day of the conference, our R&D engineer Anas presented his paper proposing a formal specification for CEP language.

Processing event streams is an increasingly important area for modern businesses aiming to detect and efficiently react to critical situations in near real-time. Due to CEP languages’ limitations and imprecise semantics, describing interesting situations remains challenging. In this paper, Anas presents a formal specification for processing complex events. The paper provides an algebra that consists of a set of operators for constructing complex events (patterns), temporally restricting the construction process and choosing among several selection and consumption policies.

To know more about his paper, you can find the slides of the presentation here and the paper here.

Tutorials

Correctness and Consistency of Event-based Systems  (Opher Etzion)

The second day of the conference was dedicated to tutorials from experts in the field. Anas gives insights into his favourite training: Correctness & Consistency of Event-Based Systems. He explains: “The speaker was Opher Etzion, one of the pioneers in the domain of event processing. The tutorial lasted for about 4 hours. What is interesting is that the speaker demonstrates with examples that building an event-based system is not trivial. Even more, a lot of existing systems are incorrect and give inconsistent results due to some problems in their semantics. To ensure correctness, you have at least to understand the sources of latencies in your system and ensure fairness between all the agents, in addition to defining a set of policies to tell the system when, how, where and what events you are looking for.”

Last month, four EURA NOVA engineers travelled to Barcelona to attend the Dataworks Summit. The conference is organised by Hortonworks, now known as Cloudera and it is about how to apply open source Big Data technology to accelerate digital transformation initiatives. They came back with a lot to say about the hot topics in AI, machine learning, architecture, the cloud, and the use cases! In this article, they share with us what they learned there and what struck them as particularly useful.

Big Trends

Data architecture

This year, one of the most important trends at the conference was data management and data architecture. Our R&D director Sabri Skhiri says: “There was a real focus on taking data lakes to their next stage and on making them actionable for AI and machine learning. The notion of data hubs was often mentioned, notably during the keynote speeches by Cloudera, IBM, and Pure Storage. However, most of the vendors of platforms have not been able yet to provide a fully-fledged ecosystem that allows the exploration, governance, and industrialisation of big data”.

AI industrialisation

This brings us to the second motto of the conference: AI industrialisation is a must. Our data engineer Khalil Amdouni explains: “The conference has been migrating towards AI topics. In the past, the conference used to focus mostly on data ingestion and data processing. It has been moving towards data science. Everyone is talking about AI and machine learning and how to put data science models into production. It’s looking into how to move from data exploration to industrialisation; we heard a lot about Cloudera’s Data Science Workbench etc.”

Production environment

The third trend of the conference was the separation between data processing tools and AI frameworks. Khalil explains: “Spark, Cloudera, Kubernetes are now all providing production environments (data science management platforms such as Cloudera Data Science Workbench, the Databricks Runtime ML, Kubeflow…) to integrate with machine learning frameworks such as Tensorflow or Python. Sabri adds: “This is interesting but we should first speak about “productisation”, data science models lifecycles, continuous integration and delivery. There are still a lot of shortcomings, like the fact that you need to centralise all your data in one partition before starting your favourite AI framework”.

Data governance

Another hot topic of the conference was data governance and compliance with regulations. Our R&D director goes on to say: “Everybody is speaking about the importance to be GDPR compliant and is proposing tools like Atlas, Egeria, IBM Infosphere, … but no one says how to actually comply with the GDPR during model deployments or how to deal with access policy management.”

Favourite Talks

Stream, Stream, Stream: Different Streaming Methods with Spark and Kafka

Itai Yaffe presented the journey made by Nielsen’s Marketing Cloud division to provide its customers with real-time analytics tools to profile their target audiences. To achieve its goal, NMC needed to continuously transform its data infrastructure to ingest billions of events per day in a scalable and yet cost-efficient manner.

Sabri says: “The first version of NMC’s architecture includes CSV files and standalone Java applications with an OLAP database to expose the result. To reach their goal, NMC’s teams had to scale the process up to handle 10 times as much data”.

Their first step was to change the architecture: they moved to Kafka to ingest data, they leveraged Spark to stream and to aggregate data, and they used HDFS to store data.

Sabri explains: “The issue here was that they had to manage the statefulness of the Spark applications on HDFS by themselves. In addition, the system was error-prone in case of failure. They tried again and looked into Spark Structured Streaming, then tried to combine Spark Streaming with batch ETLs and finally decided to use Kafka to imitate streaming over their data lake. This evolution made the situation really interesting from a business and architectural point of view. Their business goal is to support decision making with machine learning to deliver reports on campaigns. Over the years, they adapted their architecture to go further and reach that objective”.

Our architect Cyrille Duverne adds: “Their story showed how much effort is required to build a long-term architecture. Tools are not enough; you first need the use cases that lead to an architectural vision. Only then can you choose the tools that will support the vision.  To build this architecture, you need time and people with the right skills”.

To know more about NMC’s journey, you can find the slides of the presentation here.

Federated Learning

Chris Wallace is a data scientist at Cloudera Fast Forward Labs. He presented how his team leveraged federated learning to predict maintenance problems when customers of a manufacturer are not willing to share with the manufacturer the details of how their components failed, but want the manufacturer to provide them with a strategy to maintain the faulty parts.

Our architect Cyrille Duverne explains: “In this case, federated learning is a kind of distributed deep learning where you train the model on decentralised data. The main idea is that a network of nodes shares models rather than training data with the server. Each node has the untrained model that they will train using the data they have. Each node then sends a copy of its trained model back to the central server that will take the average and send the new model to the different nodes. The process is repeated until the final version of the model is reached.”

Our data scientist Malian De Ron explains: “I find federated learning very interesting. As data scientists, we can work directly on updating models, but we don’t have access to all the training data. Federated learning can be useful for use cases where the customers want to keep their data anonymous. For example, we work for a financial company that works with a bank. Neither of them is willing to share their data. By using federated learning, the training data could remain in its original location, which could satisfy our customer’s privacy concerns.

To know more about federated learning, you can find the slides of the presentation here.

Data governance with Egeria: The industry’s first open metadata standard

John Mertic is the director of program management for ODPi, the Linux Foundation’s Open Data Platform initiative. He talked about their new open metadata standard Egeria, introduced in September. John Mertic explained how the standard supports the free flow of standardised metadata between different technologies and vendor platforms, enabling organisations to locate, manage, and use their data resources more effectively.

Sabri says: ”Companies have 40 years of evolution embedded in their IT systems, resulting in high complexity of data lineage and data silos. In the complex new world of big data and real time, security models have to track data throughout the organisation. This is why data governance and metadata management are hot topics in conferences. Everybody is talking about it and proposes tools such as Egeria, IBM InfoSphere, or Atlas. I talked with IBM InfoSphere people and I had an overview of the Egeria tool. It can be used to federate the IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog, Apache Atlas and even other Egeria cohorts. The IBM Governance Catalog can pull information directly from Egeria and integrate the metadata, the lineage, and even tags from Atlas”.

To know more about Egeria, please find the slides of the presentation here.

Final Thoughts

When working with clients as they make their journey to the new digital world, we noticed recurrent problems in the areas of data access, usage, and governance. In many conferences, we hear stories of companies facing these challenges and making a lot of ad hoc choices but lacking a long-term architectural vision. To crack the challenges, our R&D director Sabri Skhiri designed the Data Architecture Vision (DAV), which later led to digazu.

The Dataworks conference highlighted the need to take data lakes to their next stage. The digazu platform, with its integrated and managed data lake, meets that need. It is a true data hub that integrates real-time and batch dataflows, that collects data from multiple sources, stores it, and distributes it to applications and users across the whole organisation.

Another need mentioned at the conference was that of providing companies with production environments to deploy models. Leveraging ever-increasing amounts of data to provide new services or solve problems requires increasing resources in terms of expertise, time and money. digazu offers a scalable way to keep data pipelines open for business in real time or batches without an army of data experts, lines of code, or complex training.

A third need highlighted at the conference is for companies to reach good data governance. There are already excellent governance tools such as Atlas, Egeria, IBM Infosphere to support the free flow of standardised metadata. digazu opens the door to automated regulatory compliance by providing ready-to-use connectors to data management and governance tools.

To learn more about digazu, visit digazu.com

A few weeks ago, Sabri Skhiri and Florian Demesmaeker were in London to attend the Spark+AI summit. They came back with a lot to say about the new features of Spark and the presented use cases! In this article, they will give you their opinion about Databricks’ main announcement, the intakes of their favourite talks and training, and what they thought of the new name of the conference.

A new name

This year, Spark expanded the summit’s scope and renamed it “Spark + AI Summit”. The goal of Databricks, announced by its co-founder Ali Ghodsi, is to incorporate unified aspects of data and AI.

Florian Demesmaeker, our R&D engineer, explains: “In some of the keynote talks, the speakers talked about use cases where the job of the data engineer is strongly reduced. The data scientists can easily experiment with data, travelling back and forth in time. This means more focus on AI, rather than on the data engineering part that makes all data accessible to the data scientists”.

Main announcement

In line with this change of name, Databricks announced the release of a complete data science lifecycle on the cloud.

Sabri Skhiri, our R&D Director, explains “It is interesting to see that the change in the event name is actually very visible in the change of Databricks’ strategy. Their tools are now completely dedicated to stream ETL, and there is a huge focus on integrated data management”.

Databricks’ new features include Databricks Delta which creates data pipeline and provides data views and exploration features. Secondly, the Databricks Runtime ML is a ready-to-use environment providing a set of pre-loaded ML frameworks where the data scientist can play with data. Finally, the MLflow tool allows to simplify the ML models development at enterprise scale.

Our R&D Director precises: “Together, these features provide a complete and unified approach to machine learning lifecycle and pipeline automation. This looks like a very competitive SaaS offer for integrated data management, available on AWS and Azure. However, the metadata management and the security aspect is still the missing piece”.

The training day

The first day of the conference was dedicated to training workshops that include a mix of instruction and hands-on exercises to help attendants improve their Apache Spark skills.

Florian gives insights into his favourite training Tuning and Best Practices. He explains: “The aim of the training was to make programmers aware of how Spark works internally, in order to be able to write optimised applications. They presented a few situations, each one showing one relatively slow process. Then they presented a step-by-step procedure to debug the situation and to find the points that could be improved in the current situation. In summary, tips and tricks to adapt to different situations”.

Favourite talks

The sessions at the conference covered data engineering and data science contents along with best practices for productionising AI. The talks were divided into roughly two categories: Spark programming and deployment, and applications on top of Spark (AI applications).

Florian Demesmaeker explains: “I attended 28 talks. The keynotes from Databricks were quite interesting, they presented Delta and MLflow. I also enjoyed the talks about tools to optimise the internals of Spark, these provided good technical details. Other talks were about use cases on top of Spark, it was interesting to see what challenges other companies face and how they address them”.

Sabri Skhiri adds: “The talk Learning to Rank Datasets for Search was very inspiring. Oscar Castañeda-Villagrán, a data scientist working at Xoom (a Paypal service) talked about learning to rank R data set. The idea is that we can extract metadata when the data pipeline is arriving in the lake. Going further, you can not only extract metadata but also calculate a kind of judgment relevance score that will be used for bootstrapping the learning to rank process. In this way, a user can search and retrieve the relevant R data set in the lake. A very good idea for the metadata-driven exploration”.

Early September 2018, 8 EURA NOVA engineers travelled to Berlin to attend the Flink Forward Conference, dedicated to Apache Flink users and stream processing communities. You can read their feedback here.