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Apache Flink VS Amazon EMR

Compare Apache Flink VS Amazon EMR and see what are their differences

Apache Flink logo Apache Flink

Flink is a streaming dataflow engine that provides data distribution, communication, and fault tolerance for distributed computations.

Amazon EMR logo Amazon EMR

Amazon Elastic MapReduce is a web service that makes it easy to quickly process vast amounts of data.
  • Apache Flink Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-03
  • Amazon EMR Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-04-02

Apache Flink features and specs

  • Real-time Stream Processing
    Apache Flink is designed for real-time data streaming, offering low-latency processing capabilities that are essential for applications requiring immediate data insights.
  • Event Time Processing
    Flink supports event time processing, which allows it to handle out-of-order events effectively and provide accurate results based on the time events actually occurred rather than when they were processed.
  • State Management
    Flink provides robust state management features, making it easier to maintain and query state across distributed nodes, which is crucial for managing long-running applications.
  • Fault Tolerance
    The framework includes built-in mechanisms for fault tolerance, such as consistent checkpoints and savepoints, ensuring high reliability and data consistency even in the case of failures.
  • Scalability
    Apache Flink is highly scalable, capable of handling both batch and stream processing workloads across a distributed cluster, making it suitable for large-scale data processing tasks.
  • Rich Ecosystem
    Flink has a rich set of APIs and integrations with other big data tools, such as Apache Kafka, Apache Hadoop, and Apache Cassandra, enhancing its versatility and ease of integration into existing data pipelines.

Possible disadvantages of Apache Flink

  • Complexity
    Flinkโ€™s advanced features and capabilities come with a steep learning curve, making it more challenging to set up and use compared to simpler stream processing frameworks.
  • Resource Intensive
    The framework can be resource-intensive, requiring substantial memory and CPU resources for optimal performance, which might be a concern for smaller setups or cost-sensitive environments.
  • Community Support
    While growing, the community around Apache Flink is not as large or mature as some other big data frameworks like Apache Spark, potentially limiting the availability of community-contributed resources and support.
  • Ecosystem Maturity
    Despite its integrations, the Flink ecosystem is still maturing, and certain tools and plugins may not be as developed or stable as those available for more established frameworks.
  • Operational Overhead
    Running and maintaining a Flink cluster can involve significant operational overhead, including monitoring, scaling, and troubleshooting, which might require a dedicated team or additional expertise.

Amazon EMR features and specs

  • Scalability
    Amazon EMR makes it easy to provision one, hundreds, or thousands of compute instances in minutes. You can easily scale your cluster up or down based on your needs.
  • Cost-effectiveness
    You only pay for what you use with EMR. There are no upfront fees. You can also leverage EC2 Spot Instances for a more cost-effective solution.
  • Ease of Use
    Amazon EMR has a user-friendly interface and integrates with a wide range of AWS services, making it easy to set up and manage big data frameworks like Apache Hadoop, Spark, etc.
  • Managed Service
    Amazon EMR takes care of the setup, configuration, and tuning of the big data environments, allowing you to focus on your data processing rather than managing infrastructure.
  • Security
    EMR integrates with AWS security features such as IAM for fine-grained access control, encryption options, and Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) for network security.
  • Flexibility
    Supports multiple big data frameworks including Hadoop, Spark, HBase, Presto, and more, facilitating a wide range of use cases.

Possible disadvantages of Amazon EMR

  • Complex Pricing Model
    EMR's pricing can be complex with costs varying based on instance types, storage, and data transfer. Predicting costs may be challenging.
  • Data Transfer Costs
    If your applications require transferring large amounts of data in and out of EMR, the associated costs can be significant.
  • Learning Curve
    Although EMR is easier to manage compared to on-premises solutions, there is still a learning curve associated with mastering the service and optimizing its various settings.
  • Vendor Lock-in
    Since EMR is an AWS service, you may find it difficult to migrate to another service or cloud provider without significant re-engineering.
  • Dependency on AWS Ecosystem
    The full potential of EMR is best realized when integrated with other AWS services. This can be limiting if your architecture uses services from multiple cloud providers.

Analysis of Apache Flink

Overall verdict

  • Yes, Apache Flink is considered a good distributed stream processing framework.

Why this product is good

  • Rich api
    Flink offers a rich set of APIs for various levels of abstraction, catering to different needs of developers.
  • Scalability
    Flink provides excellent horizontal scalability, making it suitable for handling large data streams and high-throughput applications.
  • Fault tolerance
    Flink's checkpointing mechanism ensures fault-tolerance, maintaining data state consistency even after failures.
  • Ease of integration
    Flink integrates well with other big data tools and ecosystems, facilitating broader data architecture designs.
  • Real-time processing
    It excels at processing data in real-time, allowing for immediate insights and action on streaming data.
  • Community and support
    Being a part of the Apache Software Foundation, Flink benefits from a large community and comprehensive documentation.
  • Complex event processing
    It supports complex event processing, which is essential for many real-time applications.

Recommended for

  • real-time analytics
  • stream data processing
  • complex event processing
  • machine learning in streaming applications
  • applications requiring high-throughput and low-latency processing
  • companies looking for robust fault-tolerance in distributed systems

Analysis of Amazon EMR

Overall verdict

  • Yes, Amazon EMR is generally considered a good option for organizations that need to handle large-scale data processing and analysis. Its integration with the AWS ecosystem, flexibility in resource management, and support for a wide array of big data frameworks make it a strong contender in the cloud-based big data processing market.

Why this product is good

  • Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce) is a robust cloud service provided by AWS for processing and analyzing large datasets quickly and cost-effectively. It simplifies running big data frameworks like Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark on AWS, offering scalability, flexibility, and integration with other AWS services. EMR is favored for its ability to dynamically allocate resources, thus optimizing both performance and cost for big data processing needs.

Recommended for

    Amazon EMR is recommended for data engineers, data scientists, and IT professionals who need to manage and process large datasets in a scalable, efficient, and cost-effective manner. It is especially suitable for businesses that are already using AWS services and want to leverage a tightly integrated ecosystem. Additionally, it is a good choice for organizations that require rapid and flexible data analysis capabilities provided by frameworks such as Hadoop, Spark, HBase, and Presto.

Apache Flink videos

GOTO 2019 โ€ข Introduction to Stateful Stream Processing with Apache Flink โ€ข Robert Metzger

More videos:

  • Tutorial - Apache Flink Tutorial | Flink vs Spark | Real Time Analytics Using Flink | Apache Flink Training
  • Tutorial - How to build a modern stream processor: The science behind Apache Flink - Stefan Richter

Amazon EMR videos

Amazon EMR Masterclass

More videos:

  • Review - Deep Dive into Whatโ€™s New in Amazon EMR - AWS Online Tech Talks
  • Tutorial - How to use Apache Hive and DynamoDB using Amazon EMR

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Apache Flink and Amazon EMR)
Big Data
49 49%
51% 51
Data Dashboard
0 0%
100% 100
Stream Processing
100 100%
0% 0
Databases
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Apache Flink should be more popular than Amazon EMR. It has been mentiond 45 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Apache Flink mentions (45)

  • Gravitino - the unified metadata lake
    In the meantime, other query engine support is on the roadmap, including Apache Spark, Apache Flink, and others. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • Towards Sub-100ms Latency Stream Processing with an S3-Based Architecture
    Many stream processing systems today still rely on local disks and RocksDB to manage state. This model has been around for a while and works fine in simple, single-tenant setups. Apache Flink, for example, uses RocksDB as its default state backend - state is kept on local disks, and periodic checkpoints are written to external storage for recovery. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • Introducing RisingWave's Hosted Iceberg Catalog-No External Setup Needed
    Because the hosted catalog is a standard JDBC catalog, tools like Spark, Trino, and Flink can still access your tables. For example:. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • When plans change at 500 feet: Complex event processing of ADS-B aviation data with Apache Flink
    I wrote a python based aircraft monitor which polls the adsb.fi feed for aircraft transponder messages, and publishes each location update as a new event into an Apache Kafka topic. I used Apache Flink โ€” and more specially Flink SQL, to transform and analyse my flight data. The TL;DR summary is I can write SQL for my real-time data processing queries โ€” and get the scalability, fault tolerance, and low latency... - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • What is Apache Flink? Exploring Its Open Source Business Model, Funding, and Community
    Continuous Learning: Leverage online tutorials from the official Flink website and attend webinars for deeper insights. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
View more

Amazon EMR mentions (10)

  • 5 Best Practices For Data Integration To Boost ROI And Efficiency
    There are different ways to implement parallel dataflows, such as using parallel data processing frameworks like Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark, and Apache Flink, or using cloud-based services like Amazon EMR and Google Cloud Dataflow. It is also possible to use parallel dataflow frameworks to handle big data and distributed computing, like Apache Nifi and Apache Kafka. Source: over 2 years ago
  • What compute service i should use? Advice for a duck-tape kind of guy
    I'm going to guess you want something like EMR. Which can take large data sets segment it across multiple executors and coalesce the data back into a final dataset. Source: over 3 years ago
  • Processing a large text file containing millions of records.
    This is exactly the kind of workload EMR was made for, you can even run it serverless nowadays. Athena might be a viable option as well. Source: over 3 years ago
  • How to use Spark and Pandas to prepare big data
    Apache Spark is one of the most actively developed open-source projects in big data. The following code examples require that you have Spark set up and can execute Python code using the PySpark library. The examples also require that you have your data in Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service). All this is set up on AWS EMR (Elastic MapReduce). - Source: dev.to / almost 4 years ago
  • Beginner building a Hadoop cluster
    Check out https://aws.amazon.com/emr/. Source: over 3 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Apache Flink and Amazon EMR, you can also consider the following products

Apache Spark - Apache Spark is an engine for big data processing, with built-in modules for streaming, SQL, machine learning and graph processing.

Google BigQuery - A fully managed data warehouse for large-scale data analytics.

Amazon Kinesis - Amazon Kinesis services make it easy to work with real-time streaming data in the AWS cloud.

Google Cloud Dataflow - Google Cloud Dataflow is a fully-managed cloud service and programming model for batch and streaming big data processing.

Spring Framework - The Spring Framework provides a comprehensive programming and configuration model for modern Java-based enterprise applications - on any kind of deployment platform.

Qubole - Qubole delivers a self-service platform for big aata analytics built on Amazon, Microsoft and Google Clouds.