ANN: TouK Nussknacker - designing Flink processes with GUI

[Maciek Próchniak]

Hello,

we would like to announce availability of TouK Nussknacker - tool for
creating Flink processes with GUI.


It's our attempt to bring Flink a bit closer to analysts and business
people - by letting them design processes with MS Visio-like tool ;)

Of course not every Flink process can be created by drawing diagrams,
but we wanted to make it possible for analyst to design process that
does filtering, enrichment or simple aggregations.

Our idea is pretty simple:

- first, data model and additional services have to be developed and
packaged into jar (this is the jar that is used by Flink jobs) - this is
the part where coding skills are required

- users can create new processes by drawing diagrams - the nodes in
toolbox are based on the data model. This includes e.g. creating filters
with SPEL (Spring Expression Language) expressions.

- the process is deployed to Flink cluster as jar with model and diagram
serialized as JSON

We make it easier to work with our diagrams by integration with Grafana
(each process registers quite detailed metrics about it's behaviour),
letting users test their processes via GUI with Flink mini-cluster and
various other goodies (subprocesses, basic code completion, export to
PDF etc.)


So far we have one quite large (>30 processes, >100k/s total throughput
in all processes) production deployment and a few more in progress. Our
main use case so far is RTM (Real Time Marketing) and fraud detection in
telco, banking and similar industries.

We think that our tool can be of interest mainly for more traditional
enterprises, that do not have large development teams, but have
competent analysts in their BI departments.


Nussknacker is released under ASL 2.0 (however we use React heavily so
beware of patents clause...)

Of course, we'd like to hear your opinions.


The code is here: https://github.com/touk/nussknacker

The quickstart is here: https://touk.github.io/nussknacker/Quickstart.html

And our blog post is here:
https://touk.pl/blog/2017/09/04/touk-nussknacker-using-apache-flink-made-easier-for-analysts-and-business/

I'll also be talking about Nussknacker next week at Flink Forward -
https://berlin.flink-forward.org/kb_sessions/touk-nussknacker-creating-flink-jobs-with-gui/ 
- hope to see you there :)


thanks,

maciek próchniak

TouK

[Flavio Pompermaier]

Thanks for sharing this nice tool maciek. Does it handle both batch and Streaming? Is it able to visualize also an existing Flink program?

Best,

Flavio

On Mon, Sep 4, 2017 at 3:03 PM, Maciek Próchniak <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hello,

we would like to announce availability of TouK Nussknacker - tool for creating Flink processes with GUI.


It's our attempt to bring Flink a bit closer to analysts and business people - by letting them design processes with MS Visio-like tool ;)

Of course not every Flink process can be created by drawing diagrams, but we wanted to make it possible for analyst to design process that does filtering, enrichment or simple aggregations.

Our idea is pretty simple:

- first, data model and additional services have to be developed and packaged into jar (this is the jar that is used by Flink jobs) - this is the part where coding skills are required

- users can create new processes by drawing diagrams - the nodes in toolbox are based on the data model. This includes e.g. creating filters with SPEL (Spring Expression Language) expressions.

- the process is deployed to Flink cluster as jar with model and diagram serialized as JSON

We make it easier to work with our diagrams by integration with Grafana (each process registers quite detailed metrics about it's behaviour), letting users test their processes via GUI with Flink mini-cluster and various other goodies (subprocesses, basic code completion, export to PDF etc.)


So far we have one quite large (>30 processes, >100k/s total throughput in all processes) production deployment and a few more in progress. Our main use case so far is RTM (Real Time Marketing) and fraud detection in telco, banking and similar industries.

We think that our tool can be of interest mainly for more traditional enterprises, that do not have large development teams, but have competent analysts in their BI departments.


Nussknacker is released under ASL 2.0 (however we use React heavily so beware of patents clause...)

Of course, we'd like to hear your opinions.


The code is here: https://github.com/touk/nussknacker

The quickstart is here: https://touk.github.io/nussknacker/Quickstart.html

And our blog post is here: https://touk.pl/blog/2017/09/04/touk-nussknacker-using-apache-flink-made-easier-for-analysts-and-business/

I'll also be talking about Nussknacker next week at Flink Forward - https://berlin.flink-forward.org/kb_sessions/touk-nussknacker-creating-flink-jobs-with-gui/ - hope to see you there :)


thanks,

maciek próchniak

TouK

[Maciek Próchniak]

Hi Flavio,

we have rather modest goals - so currently we don't plan to handle batch (although in theory it could be done). We also don't even think about visualizing and editing existing programs - in generality this could be pretty difficult.

We only let users define pretty simple diagrams (in particular they have to be trees, not DAGs) to be able to handle them properly (although we do have mechanism to plug-in custom Flink code - it just have to be coded separately as part of the model)

thanks,

maciek

On 04/09/2017 15:43, Flavio Pompermaier wrote:

Thanks for sharing this nice tool maciek. Does it handle both batch and Streaming? Is it able to visualize also an existing Flink program?

Best,

Flavio

On Mon, Sep 4, 2017 at 3:03 PM, Maciek Próchniak <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hello,

we would like to announce availability of TouK Nussknacker - tool for creating Flink processes with GUI.


It's our attempt to bring Flink a bit closer to analysts and business people - by letting them design processes with MS Visio-like tool ;)

Of course not every Flink process can be created by drawing diagrams, but we wanted to make it possible for analyst to design process that does filtering, enrichment or simple aggregations.

Our idea is pretty simple:

- first, data model and additional services have to be developed and packaged into jar (this is the jar that is used by Flink jobs) - this is the part where coding skills are required

- users can create new processes by drawing diagrams - the nodes in toolbox are based on the data model. This includes e.g. creating filters with SPEL (Spring Expression Language) expressions.

- the process is deployed to Flink cluster as jar with model and diagram serialized as JSON

We make it easier to work with our diagrams by integration with Grafana (each process registers quite detailed metrics about it's behaviour), letting users test their processes via GUI with Flink mini-cluster and various other goodies (subprocesses, basic code completion, export to PDF etc.)


So far we have one quite large (>30 processes, >100k/s total throughput in all processes) production deployment and a few more in progress. Our main use case so far is RTM (Real Time Marketing) and fraud detection in telco, banking and similar industries.

We think that our tool can be of interest mainly for more traditional enterprises, that do not have large development teams, but have competent analysts in their BI departments.


Nussknacker is released under ASL 2.0 (however we use React heavily so beware of patents clause...)

Of course, we'd like to hear your opinions.


The code is here: https://github.com/touk/nussknacker

The quickstart is here: https://touk.github.io/nussknacker/Quickstart.html

And our blog post is here: https://touk.pl/blog/2017/09/04/touk-nussknacker-using-apache-flink-made-easier-for-analysts-and-business/

I'll also be talking about Nussknacker next week at Flink Forward - https://berlin.flink-forward.org/kb_sessions/touk-nussknacker-creating-flink-jobs-with-gui/ - hope to see you there :)


thanks,

maciek próchniak

TouK