Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Google Cloud Dataflow VS Spark Streaming

Compare Google Cloud Dataflow VS Spark Streaming and see what are their differences

Google Cloud Dataflow logo Google Cloud Dataflow

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

Spark Streaming logo Spark Streaming

Spark Streaming makes it easy to build scalable and fault-tolerant streaming applications.
  • Google Cloud Dataflow Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-03
  • Spark Streaming Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-01-10

Google Cloud Dataflow features and specs

  • Scalability
    Google Cloud Dataflow can automatically scale up or down depending on your data processing needs, handling massive datasets with ease.
  • Fully Managed
    Dataflow is a fully managed service, which means you don't have to worry about managing the underlying infrastructure.
  • Unified Programming Model
    It provides a single programming model for both batch and streaming data processing using Apache Beam, simplifying the development process.
  • Integration
    Seamlessly integrates with other Google Cloud services like BigQuery, Cloud Storage, and Bigtable.
  • Real-time Analytics
    Supports real-time data processing, enabling quicker insights and facilitating faster decision-making.
  • Cost Efficiency
    Pay-as-you-go pricing model ensures you only pay for resources you actually use, which can be cost-effective.
  • Global Availability
    Cloud Dataflow is available globally, which allows for regionalized data processing.
  • Fault Tolerance
    Built-in fault tolerance mechanisms help ensure uninterrupted data processing.

Possible disadvantages of Google Cloud Dataflow

  • Steep Learning Curve
    The complexity of using Apache Beam and understanding its model can be challenging for beginners.
  • Debugging Difficulties
    Debugging data processing pipelines can be complex and time-consuming, especially for large-scale data flows.
  • Cost Management
    While it can be cost-efficient, the costs can rise quickly if not monitored properly, particularly with real-time data processing.
  • Vendor Lock-in
    Using Google Cloud Dataflow can lead to vendor lock-in, making it challenging to migrate to another cloud provider.
  • Limited Support for Non-Google Services
    While it integrates well within Google Cloud, support for non-Google services may not be as robust.
  • Latency
    There can be some latency in data processing, especially when dealing with high volumes of data.
  • Complexity in Pipeline Design
    Designing pipelines to be efficient and cost-effective can be complex, requiring significant expertise.

Spark Streaming features and specs

  • Scalability
    Spark Streaming is highly scalable and can handle large volumes of data by distributing the workload across a cluster of machines. It leverages Apache Spark's capabilities to scale out easily and efficiently.
  • Integration
    It integrates seamlessly with other components of the Spark ecosystem, such as Spark SQL, MLlib, and GraphX, allowing for comprehensive data processing pipelines.
  • Fault Tolerance
    Spark Streaming provides fault tolerance by using Spark's micro-batching approach, which allows the system to recover data in case of a failure.
  • Ease of Use
    Spark Streaming provides high-level APIs in Java, Scala, and Python, making it relatively easy to develop and deploy streaming applications quickly.
  • Unified Platform
    It provides a unified platform for both batch and streaming data processing, allowing reuse of code and resources across different types of workloads.

Possible disadvantages of Spark Streaming

  • Latency
    Spark Streaming operates on a micro-batch processing model, which introduces latency compared to real-time processing. This may not be suitable for applications requiring immediate responses.
  • Complexity
    While it integrates well with other Spark components, building complex streaming applications can still be challenging and may require expertise in distributed systems and stream processing concepts.
  • Resource Management
    Efficiently managing cluster resources and tuning the system can be difficult, especially when dealing with variable workload and ensuring optimal performance.
  • Backpressure Handling
    Handling backpressure effectively can be a challenge in Spark Streaming, requiring careful management to prevent resource saturation or data loss.
  • Limited Windowing Support
    Compared to some stream processing frameworks, Spark Streaming has more limited options for complex windowing operations, which can restrict some advanced use cases.

Google Cloud Dataflow videos

Introduction to Google Cloud Dataflow - Course Introduction

More videos:

  • Review - Serverless data processing with Google Cloud Dataflow (Google Cloud Next '17)
  • Review - Apache Beam and Google Cloud Dataflow

Spark Streaming videos

Spark Streaming Vs Kafka Streams || Which is The Best for Stream Processing?

More videos:

  • Tutorial - Spark Streaming Vs Structured Streaming Comparison | Big Data Hadoop Tutorial

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Google Cloud Dataflow and Spark Streaming)
Big Data
80 80%
20% 20
Stream Processing
0 0%
100% 100
Data Dashboard
100 100%
0% 0
Data Management
53 53%
47% 47

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Google Cloud Dataflow and Spark Streaming

Google Cloud Dataflow Reviews

Top 8 Apache Airflow Alternatives in 2024
Google Cloud Dataflow is highly focused on real-time streaming data and batch data processing from web resources, IoT devices, etc. Data gets cleansed and filtered as Dataflow implements Apache Beam to simplify large-scale data processing. Such prepared data is ready for analysis for Google BigQuery or other analytics tools for prediction, personalization, and other purposes.
Source: blog.skyvia.com

Spark Streaming Reviews

We have no reviews of Spark Streaming yet.
Be the first one to post

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Google Cloud Dataflow should be more popular than Spark Streaming. It has been mentiond 14 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.

Google Cloud Dataflow mentions (14)

  • How do you implement CDC in your organization
    Imo if you are using the cloud and not doing anything particularly fancy the native tooling is good enough. For AWS that is DMS (for RDBMS) and Kinesis/Lamba (for streams). Google has Data Fusion and Dataflow . Azure hasData Factory if you are unfortunate enough to have to use SQL Server or Azure. Imo the vendored tools and open source tools are more useful when you need to ingest data from SaaS platforms, and... Source: over 2 years ago
  • Here’s a playlist of 7 hours of music I use to focus when I’m coding/developing. Post yours as well if you also have one!
    This sub is for Apache Beam and Google Cloud Dataflow as the sidebar suggests. Source: over 2 years ago
  • How are view/listen counts rolled up on something like Spotify/YouTube?
    I am pretty sure they are using pub/sub with probably a Dataflow pipeline to process all that data. Source: over 2 years ago
  • Best way to export several GCP datasets to AWS?
    You can run a Dataflow job that copies the data directly from BQ into S3, though you'll have to run a job per table. This can be somewhat expensive to do. Source: over 2 years ago
  • Why we don’t use Spark
    It was clear we needed something that was built specifically for our big-data SaaS requirements. Dataflow was our first idea, as the service is fully managed, highly scalable, fairly reliable and has a unified model for streaming & batch workloads. Sadly, the cost of this service was quite large. Secondly, at that moment in time, the service only accepted Java implementations, of which we had little knowledge... - Source: dev.to / almost 3 years ago
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Spark Streaming mentions (5)

  • RisingWave Turns Four: Our Journey Beyond Democratizing Stream Processing
    The last decade saw the rise of open-source frameworks like Apache Flink, Spark Streaming, and Apache Samza. These offered more flexibility but still demanded significant engineering muscle to run effectively at scale. Companies using them often needed specialized stream processing engineers just to manage internal state, tune performance, and handle the day-to-day operational challenges. The barrier to entry... - Source: dev.to / 16 days ago
  • Streaming Data Alchemy: Apache Kafka Streams Meet Spring Boot
    Apache Spark Streaming: Offers micro-batch processing, suitable for high-throughput scenarios that can tolerate slightly higher latency. https://spark.apache.org/streaming/. - Source: dev.to / 9 months ago
  • Choosing Between a Streaming Database and a Stream Processing Framework in Python
    Other stream processing engines (such as Flink and Spark Streaming) provide SQL interfaces too, but the key difference is a streaming database has its storage. Stream processing engines require a dedicated database to store input and output data. On the other hand, streaming databases utilize cloud-native storage to maintain materialized views and states, allowing data replication and independent storage scaling. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • Machine Learning Pipelines with Spark: Introductory Guide (Part 1)
    Spark Streaming: The component for real-time data processing and analytics. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Spark for beginners - and you
    Is a big data framework and currently one of the most popular tools for big data analytics. It contains libraries for data analysis, machine learning, graph analysis and streaming live data. In general Spark is faster than Hadoop, as it does not write intermediate results to disk. It is not a data storage system. We can use Spark on top of HDFS or read data from other sources like Amazon S3. It is the designed... - Source: dev.to / over 3 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Google Cloud Dataflow and Spark Streaming, you can also consider the following products

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.

Amazon EMR - Amazon Elastic MapReduce is a web service that makes it easy to quickly process vast amounts of data.

Confluent - Confluent offers a real-time data platform built around Apache Kafka.

Databricks - Databricks provides a Unified Analytics Platform that accelerates innovation by unifying data science, engineering and business.‎What is Apache Spark?

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