Technology and Trends

Introduction to Apache Flume: Components and Channels

Apache Flume is an Apache open source project used for moving massive quantities of streaming data into HDFS. It collects log data from the web server logs files and aggregates it in HDFS for analysis.

It supports multiple sources like –’tail’, System logs, Apache Access Logs, and Apache log4j. Furthermore, it provides end-to-end reliability because of its transactional approach to the data flow.

Flume Core Components

The core components of Flume are given below.

Channels in Apache Flume

Apache Flume has three different built-in channels to transport log files.

In the memory-based channel, events are read from the source into memory and passed to the sink.

JDBC channel stores the events in an embedded Derby database.

This channel first writes the contents to a file on the file system after reading the event from a source. This file is then deleted only after the contents are successfully delivered to the sink.

Among all these channels, the memory channel is the fastest channel whereas the file channel is the most reliable one. One caveat of using a memory channel is that it has the risk of data loss. But File-based channel does not have data loss. The different organization chooses different channels according to their use case.

Conclusion

In this blog post, we learned about Apache Flume, its core components, and its channels.

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