Quickly start of the Nifi crash course

As I said last in my last blogpost, I have followed the Apache NiFi crash course that Hortonworks provides. Now the tutorial describes several different scenarios and options and you have to read through that to find which you want. And you don’t have time for that. You’re probably doing this in your spare time and you have a whole Netflix backlog.

So in this guide we cut right to the chase. It took me about 10 hours to follow Tutorial 0, 1, 2 and 3. But perhaps this guide can make you do it in about 4 hours.

1. Preparing the VM

First download the Hortonworks Sandbox. There’s a VirtualBox (used in this example), VMWare and Docker image that come preinstalled with many products, but NiFi isn’t installed just yet (this guide is based on the HDP 2.6 sandbox).

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My first experiences with Apache NiFi

There are a lot of data-related Apache products out there and it’s hard to keep up with all of them. There are several products to stream or flow data (what’s the difference?). Like Kafka, Storm, Flink and NiFi. Yes, all products have documentation, but for an outsider their description sounds like “enterprise scalable streaming solutions”. What does that tell you?

I followed a Crash Course on Apache Nifi at the DataWorks Summit in München last month and was quite impressed. At heart I’m a command line kind of guy, but this graphical interface is really slick and it’s amazing what you can do to find out where your data goes to with NiFi. I decided to organize a workshop for my colleagues at Open Circle Solutions. (more…)