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Amazon ElastiCache vs Apache Spark: What are the differences?
What is Amazon ElastiCache? Deploy, operate, and scale an in-memory cache in the cloud. ElastiCache improves the performance of web applications by allowing you to retrieve information from fast, managed, in-memory caches, instead of relying entirely on slower disk-based databases. ElastiCache supports Memcached and Redis.
What is Apache Spark? Fast and general engine for large-scale data processing. Spark is a fast and general processing engine compatible with Hadoop data. It can run in Hadoop clusters through YARN or Spark's standalone mode, and it can process data in HDFS, HBase, Cassandra, Hive, and any Hadoop InputFormat. It is designed to perform both batch processing (similar to MapReduce) and new workloads like streaming, interactive queries, and machine learning.
Amazon ElastiCache belongs to "Managed Memcache" category of the tech stack, while Apache Spark can be primarily classified under "Big Data Tools".
Some of the features offered by Amazon ElastiCache are:
- Support for two engines: Memcached and Redis
- Ease of management via the AWS Management Console. With a few clicks you can configure and launch instances for the engine you wish to use.
- Compatibility with the specific engine protocol. This means most of the client libraries will work with the respective engines they were built for - no additional changes or tweaking required.
On the other hand, Apache Spark provides the following key features:
- Run programs up to 100x faster than Hadoop MapReduce in memory, or 10x faster on disk
- Write applications quickly in Java, Scala or Python
- Combine SQL, streaming, and complex analytics
"Redis" is the primary reason why developers consider Amazon ElastiCache over the competitors, whereas "Open-source" was stated as the key factor in picking Apache Spark.
Apache Spark is an open source tool with 22.3K GitHub stars and 19.3K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Apache Spark's open source repository on GitHub.
According to the StackShare community, Amazon ElastiCache has a broader approval, being mentioned in 342 company stacks & 79 developers stacks; compared to Apache Spark, which is listed in 263 company stacks and 111 developer stacks.
We have a Kafka topic having events of type A and type B. We need to perform an inner join on both type of events using some common field (primary-key). The joined events to be inserted in Elasticsearch.
In usual cases, type A and type B events (with same key) observed to be close upto 15 minutes. But in some cases they may be far from each other, lets say 6 hours. Sometimes event of either of the types never come.
In all cases, we should be able to find joined events instantly after they are joined and not-joined events within 15 minutes.
The first solution that came to me is to use upsert to update ElasticSearch:
- Use the primary-key as ES document id
- Upsert the records to ES as soon as you receive them. As you are using upsert, the 2nd record of the same primary-key will not overwrite the 1st one, but will be merged with it.
Cons: The load on ES will be higher, due to upsert.
To use Flink:
- Create a KeyedDataStream by the primary-key
- In the ProcessFunction, save the first record in a State. At the same time, create a Timer for 15 minutes in the future
- When the 2nd record comes, read the 1st record from the State, merge those two, and send out the result, and clear the State and the Timer if it has not fired
- When the Timer fires, read the 1st record from the State and send out as the output record.
- Have a 2nd Timer of 6 hours (or more) if you are not using Windowing to clean up the State
Pro: if you have already having Flink ingesting this stream. Otherwise, I would just go with the 1st solution.
Please refer "Structured Streaming" feature of Spark. Refer "Stream - Stream Join" at https://spark.apache.org/docs/latest/structured-streaming-programming-guide.html#stream-stream-joins . In short you need to specify "Define watermark delays on both inputs" and "Define a constraint on time across the two inputs"
Pros of Amazon ElastiCache
- Redis58
- High-performance32
- Backed by amazon26
- Memcached21
- Elastic14
Pros of Apache Spark
- Open-source61
- Fast and Flexible48
- One platform for every big data problem8
- Great for distributed SQL like applications8
- Easy to install and to use6
- Works well for most Datascience usecases3
- Interactive Query2
- Machine learning libratimery, Streaming in real2
- In memory Computation2
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Cons of Amazon ElastiCache
Cons of Apache Spark
- Speed4
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What is Amazon ElastiCache?
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